high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Visualising computational simulation models of solid state physical systems is a hard problem for dense lattice models. Fly-throughs and cutaways can aid viewer understanding of a simulated system. Interactive time model parameter updates and overlaying of measurements and graticules, cluster colour labelling and other visual highlighting cues can also enhance user intuition of the model’s […]

Lattice gas cellular automata (LGCA) models provide a relatively fast means of simulating fluid flow and can give both quantitative and qualitative insights into flow patterns around complex obstacles. Symmetry requirements inherent in the Navier-Stokes equation mandate that lattice-gas approximations to the full field equations be run on triangular lattices in two dimensions and on […]

Recent advances in image acquisition technology and its availability in the medical and bio-medical fields have lead to an unprecedented amount of high-resolution imaging data. However, the inherent complexity of this data, caused by its tremendous size, complex structure or multi-modality poses several challenges for current visualization tools. Recent developments in graphics hardware architecture have […]

Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) are good data-parallel performance accelerators for solving regular mesh partial differential equations (PDEs) whereby low-latency communications and high compute to communications ratios can yield very high levels of computational efficiency. Finite-difference time-domain methods still play an important role for many PDE applications. Iterative multi-grid and multilevel algorithms can converge faster than […]

Three-dimensional simulation models are hard to visualise for dense lattice systems, even with cutaways and flythrough techniques. We use multiple Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), CUDA and OpenGL to increase our understanding of computational simulation models such as the 2-D and 3-D Ising systems with small-world link rewiring by accelerating both the simulation and visualisation into […]

Finite-difference methods can be useful for solving certain partial differential equations (PDEs) in the time domain. Compiler technologies can be used to parse an application domain specific representation of these PDEs and build an abstract representation of both the equation and the desired solver. This abstract representation can be used to generate a language-specific implementation. […]

Modern parallel microprocessors deliver high performance on applications that expose substantial fine-grained data parallelism. Although data parallelism is widely available in many computations, implementing data parallel algorithms in low-level languages is often an unnecessarily difficult task. The characteristics of parallel microprocessors and the limitations of current programming methodologies motivate our design of Copperhead, a high-level […]

This technical report extends our previous paper on sparse voxel octrees. We first discuss the benefits and drawbacks of voxel representations and how the storage space requirements behave for different kinds of content. Then, we explain in detail our compact data structure for storing voxels and an efficient ray cast algorithm that utilizes this structure, […]

In this paper we examine the possibilities of using voxel representations as a generic way for expressing complex and feature-rich geometry on current and future GPUs. We present in detail a compact data structure for storing voxels and an efficient algorithm for performing ray casts using this structure. We augment the voxel data with novel […]

Manycore processors with wide SIMD cores are becoming a popular choice for the next generation of throughput oriented architectures. We introduce a hardware technique called “diverge on miss” that allows SIMD cores to better tolerate memory latency for workloads with non-contiguous memory access patterns. Individual threads within a SIMD “warp” are allowed to slip behind […]

Soft shadows, glossy reflections and depth of field are valuable effects for realistic rendering and are often computed using distribution ray tracing (DRT). These “blurry” effects often need not be accurate and are sometimes simulated by blurring an image with sharper effects, such as blurring hard shadows to simulate soft shadows. One of the most […]

Bounding volume hierarchies (BVH) have become a widely used alternative to kD-trees as the acceleration structure of choice in modern ray tracing systems. However, BVHs adapt poorly to non-uniformly tessellated scenes, which leads to increased ray shooting costs. This paper presents a novel and practical BVH construction algorithm, which addresses the issue by utilizing spatial […]