High-performance computer graphics technologies in engineering applications

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate possibilities to adopt state-of-the-art computer graphics technologies for big data visualization in engineering applications. Toward this purpose, a conceptual heterogeneous system is proposed for graphical rendering, which is established with multiple central processing unit cores and multiple graphics processing unit GPUs. Design/methodology/approach The design of the system supports both general-purpose computation and graphics-related computation. Three processing components are discussed to fulfill the execution requirements in load balancing, data streaming and display. This design fully uses computational and memory resources and enhances the performance with the support of GPU-based parallelization. Findings The advantages and disadvantages of particular technical methods for each processing component are discussed. The possible ways to integrate them are analyzed. Originality/value This work has contributions of using computer graphics technologies in engineering applications.