high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

The project evaluates how well a haptic device can be used to interact with a visualization of volumetric data. Since the interface to the haptic device require explicit surface descriptions, triangles had to be constructed from the volumetric data. The algorithm used to extract these triangles is marching cubes. The triangles produced by marching cubes are then transmitted to the haptic device to enable the force feedback. Marching cubes was suitable for parallelization and it was executed using OpenCL. Graphs in the report shows how this parallelization ran almost 70 times faster than the sequential CPU counterpart of the same algorithm. Further development of the project would give medical students the opportunity to practice difficult procedures on a simulation instead of a real patient. This would give a realistic and accurate simulation to practice on.