STERN: a highly scalable parallel stereo terrain renderer for planetary mission simulations

In this paper, we describe STREN, a parallel stereo renderer for fixed-location terrain rendering tasks required for the simulation of planetary exploration missions. The renderer is based on a novel spatial data representation, called the TANPO map. This data representation stores terrain data using a simple and compact structure and provides excellent locality for such rendering applications. Experimental results show that the renderer not only performs very well, but also scales perfectly to different numbers of processors. Examples of the rendered result is show below using the red/blue stereo display method. Click on the image to view an stereo MPEG movie (2 MBytes).