Using Morton Codes to Partition Faceted Geometry: An Architecture for Terabyte-Scale Geometry Models
Abstract
The Virtual Environment for Sensor Performance Assessment (VESPA) project requires enormous, high-fidelity landscape models to generate synthetic sensor imagery with little to no artificial artifacts. These high-fidelity landscapes require a memory footprint substantially larger than a single High Performance Computers (HPC) compute nodes local memory. Processing geometries this size requires distributing the geometry over multiple compute nodes instead of including a full copy in each compute node, the common approach in parallel modeling applications. To process these geometric models in parallel memory on a high-performance computing system, the Geometry Engine component of the VESPA project includes an architecture for partitioning the geometry spatially using Morton codes and MPI (Message Passing Interface) collective communication routines. The methods used for this partitioning process will be addressed in this report. Incorporating this distributed architecture into the Geometry Engine provides the capability to distribute and perform parallel ray casting on landscape geometries over a Terabyte in size. Test case timings demonstrate scalable speedups as the number of processes are increased on an HPC machine.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Apr 07, 2020
- Accession Number
- AD1098221
Entities
People
- Barry C. White
- Jerrell Jr R. Ballard
- Reena R. Patel
- Robert H. Hunter
Organizations
- Engineer Research and Development Center