high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

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 […]

We discuss the mapping of elementary ray tracing operations—acceleration structure traversal and primitive intersection—onto wide SIMD/SIMT machines. Our focus is on NVIDIA GPUs, but some of the observations should be valid for other wide machines as well. While several fast GPU tracing methods have been published, very little is actually understood about their performance. Nobody […]

We introduce a meshless hierarchical representation for solving light transport problems. Precomputed radiance transfer (PRT) and finite elements require a discrete representation of illumination over the scene. Non-hierarchical approaches such as per-vertex values are simple to implement, but lead to long precomputation. Hierarchical bases like wavelets lead to dramatic acceleration, but in their basic form […]

In this paper, we describe transformation recipes, which provide a high-level interface to the code transformation and code generation capability of a compiler. These recipes can be generated by compiler decision algorithms or savvy software developers. This interface is part of an auto-tuning framework that explores a set of different implementations of the same computation […]

Recent increases in the programmability and performance of GPUs have led to a surge of interest in utilizing them for general-purpose computations. Tools such as NVIDIA’s Cuda allow programmers to use a C-like language to code algorithms for execution on the GPU. Unfortunately, parallel programs are prone to subtle correctness and performance bugs, and Cuda […]