Parallel3D is a KMB-project (“Kunnskapsprosjekt med Brukermedvirkning” –“Competence project with user participation”) granted by the VERDIKT-program of The Research Council of Norway.

Project idea:  To exploit the parallelism now being introduced in commodity hardware to drastically improve access to, interaction with, and processing and presentation of massive static and time-varying 3D rich contents.

The focus in Parallel3D will be on natural and human made objects and structures, medical data, industrial and scientific simulation results, and combinations thereof:

• To develop methods for rich contents handling that balance three levels of parallelism: Data stream processing (on Programmable Graphics Processing Units), Threading (multi-core CPUs and multi-CPU computers) and Message passing (parallel computers and networks of computers).
• To address how to organize structures of rich contents in a parallel environment and replace or enhance the traditional scene graph approach with new concepts.
• To develop working prototypes of core software libraries for handling of rich contents in parallel environments.
• To supervise two PhD fellows.
• To demonstrate the new approach for rich contents visualization and interaction on selected large data sets from the public sector and industry.
• To write tutorials and academic papers for international publication, both addressing domain experts, a general IT audience and a general audience.
• To disseminate project results to Norwegian industry to establish new and improve existing Norwegian IT-products.

Partners: Together with SINTEF ICT, Department of Applied Mathematics, Kongsberg SIM (earlier Systems in Motion) is a industrial partner on the project, and Centre of Mathematics for Applications is a academic partner.

Funding:  The project is KMB-project funded 80% by The Research Council of Norway under contract number 180023/S10, and 20% by Kongsberg SIM. The duration of the project is 2007--2010.