Utilization of VLSI for Creating an Active Data Base of 3-D Geometric Models

Parallelism of geometric computation can be achieved by distri­ buting the computation efforts according to essentially three different strategies, based on functional, spatial and struc­ tural division, respectively (Mantyla 1983). The conventional and already commercialized way to introduce parallel computa­ tion for viewing 3-D geometric models is employing functional parallelism as a pipeline for performing different sequential transformation phases of the 3-D viewing operation (Clark 1981). This approach limits the number of parallel activities to the number of separable functional computational modules. A second approach for parallelism is the division of the modeling space into separable volume elements, which can be processed independently using a suitable data structure like an octree (Kronlof 1985). The logical component structure of a model gives a third distribution strategy. Then each processor answers only to the computational needs of its assigned ob­ jects.