high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

This paper describes a GPU framework for the real-time visualization of natural textured terrains, as well as the steps that are needed to populate them on-the-fly with tens of thousands of plant and/or mineral objects. Our main contribution is a robust modular architecture developed for the G80 and later GPUs, that performs texture/seed selection and […]

Previously either due to hardware GPU limits or older versions of software, careful implementation of PRNGs was required to make good use of the limited numerical precision available on graphics cards. Newer nVidia G80 and Tesla hardware support double precision. This is available to high level programmers via CUDA. This allows a much simpler C++ […]

This paper introduces a novel method for simulating photon mapping for real-time applications. First we introduce a new method for selectively redistributing photons. Then we describe a method for selectively updating the indirect illumination. The indirect illumination is calculated using a new GPU accelerated final gathering method and the illumination is then stored in light […]

Current methods that interactively render reasonably complex CSG objects are image based and are severely bandwidth limited. This paper presents a new approach to raytracing CSG objects composed of convex primitives that combines spatial subdivision and ray-tracing methods. By performing spatial subdivision on the CSG object until locally it is simple enough to be rendered […]

In this paper we present a fast method for computing acoustic likelihoods that makes use of a graphics processing unit (GPU). After enabling the GPU acceleration the main processor runtime dedicated to acoustic scoring tasks is reduced from the largest consumer to just a few percent even when using mixture models with a large number […]

In this paper we present a multi-GPU parallel volume rendering implemention built using the MapReduce programming model. We give implementation details of the library, including specific optimizations made for our rendering and compositing design. We analyze the theoretical peak performance and bottlenecks for all tasks required and show that our system significantly reduces computation as […]

This article introduces Nohalo level 1 (“Nohalo”), the simplest member of a family of image resamplers which straighten diagonal interfaces without adding noticeable nonlinear artifacts. Nohalo is interpolatory, co-monotone, co-convex, antialiasing, local average preserving, continuous, and exact on linears. Like many edge-enhancing methods, Nohalo has two main stages: first, nonlinear interpolation is used to create […]

Rendering large crowds of characters requires a great amount of computational power. To increase the efficiency for this render, we propose the use of the graphics processor, in combination of two different level-of-detail techniques: impostors, for characters with low detail, and pseudo-instancing, for characters with full detail. In addition, different approaches are used to increase […]

Although trivial background subtraction algorithms (such as temporal averaging) can execute quite quickly, they do not give useful results in most situations. More complex algorithms usually provide better results, but are typically too slow for widespread use. Here, we examine the architecture of the GPU and describe how a multimodal background subtraction algorithm can be […]

We present a graphics hardware implementation of the tangent-plane algorithm for computing the kth-order Voronoi diagram of a set of point sites in image space. Correct and efficient implementation of this algorithm using graphics hardware is possible only with the use of an appropriate shader program on the GPU. This is achieved by rendering in […]

The Fourier volume rendering technique operates in the frequency domain and creates line integral projections of a 3D scalar field. These projections can be efficiently generated in O(N^2 log N) by utilizing the Fourier Slice-Projection theorem. However, until now, the mathematical difficulty of the Fast Fourier Transform prevented acceleration by graphics hardware and therefore limited […]

The GPUs pack high computation power and a restricted architecture into easily available hardware today. They are now used as computation co-processors and come with programming models that treat them as standard parallel architectures. We explore the problem of realtime ray casting of large deformable models (over a million triangles) on large displays (a million […]