Direct volume visualization is an important method in many areas, including computational fluid dynamics and medicine. Achieving interactive rates for direct volume rendering of large unstructured volumetric grids is a challenging problem, but parallelizing direct volume rendering algorithms can help achieve this goal. Using Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA), we propose a GPU-based volume rendering algorithm that itself is based on a cell projection-based ray-casting algorithm designed for CPU implementations. We also propose a multicore parallelized version of the cell-projection algorithm using OpenMP. In both algorithms, we favor image quality over rendering speed. Our algorithm has a low memory footprint, allowing us to render large datasets. Our algorithm supports progressive rendering. Wecompared the GPU implementation with the serial and multicore implementations.We observed significant speed-ups that, together with progressive rendering, enables reaching interactive rates for large datasets. © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Visualization of large volumetric datasets has always been an important problem. Due to the high computational requirements of volume-rendering techniques, achieving interactive rates is a real challenge. We present a selective refinement scheme that dynamically refines the mesh according to the camera parameters. This scheme automatically determines the impact of different parts of the mesh on the output image and refines the mesh accordingly, without needing any user input. The view-dependent refinement scheme uses a progressive mesh representation that is based on an edge collapse-based tetrahedral mesh simplification algorithm. We tested our view-dependent refinement framework on an existing state-of-theart volume renderer. Thanks to low overhead dynamic view-dependent refinement, we achieve interactive frame rates for rendering common datasets at decent image resolutions. Keywords Volume visualization Á Direct volume rendering Á View-dependent refinement Á Progressive meshes Á Unstructured tetrahedral meshes Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (

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Determining the crystal structure parameters of a material is an important issue in crystallography and material science. Knowing the crystal structure parameters helps in understanding the physical behavior of material. It can be difficult to obtain crystal parameters for complex structures, particularly those materials that show local symmetry as well as global symmetry. This work provides a tool that extracts crystal parameters such as primitive vectors, basis vectors and space groups from the atomic coordinates of crystal structures. A visualization tool for examining crystals is also provided. Accordingly, this work could help crystallographers, chemists and material scientists to analyze crystal structures efficiently.

Cataloged from PDF version of article.We present a revised version of the BilKristal tool of Okuyan et al. (2007). We converted the development environment into Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 in order to resolve compatibility issues. We added multi-core CPU support and improvements are made to graphics functions in order to improve performance. Discovered bugs are fixed and exporting functionality to a material visualization tool is added