high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Ray Casting is an important visual application, used to visualize 3D datasets, such as CT data used in medical imaging. High quality image generation algorithms, known as ray casting, cast rays through the volume, performing compositing of each voxel into a corresponding pixel, based on voxel opacity and color. Since all rays perform the computations independently, the problem is very much portable for parallel architectures. Tracing multiple rays using SIMD is challenging, because rays can access non-contiguous memory locations, resulting in incoherent and irregular memory accesses. The aim of this project is to first develop optimized algorithms for both CPU and GPU implementations and then move on to a hybrid version. We wish to demonstrate that a hybrid implementation is much faster than either a CPU or a GPU implementation.