FPBench Community Meeting 2022-11-03

[Bill Zorn]

Hi all!

This Thursday (November 3rd) at 9am Pacific time we will have our next FPBench Community Meeting. The meeting is a chance to talk about numerics research, share early demos, brainstorm new ideas, and stay in touch. We'll keep tweaking the format as we learn more about what works for the community.

Chris Uchytil, a Mechanical Engineering PhD student at UW, will be presenting some work at the intersection of numerics and CAD (computer-aided design). Abstract below:

We present a novel computer-aided design (CAD) modeling system designed to support a modeling range that matches the fabrication range of modern additive manufacturing (AM) systems that are capable of producing large-scale, high-resolution parts. To be useful to designers and fabricators, a modeling system must perform essential functions (such as execution of modeling operations, visualization, and slicing) at interactive rates, and achieving the necessary performance depends on efficient use of both memory and computing capacity. Our approach to achieving necessary performance levels is to implement an implicit function-based representation (f-rep) modeling system, not using a computer algebra system, but instead using just-in-time (JIT) compilation of user-defined functions. Efficient memory usage is achieved via a sparse volume data structure that builds on previous work by Hoetzlein [Hoetzlein 2016]. Computational efficiency is achieved through a combination of interval arithmetic (IA) and massively parallel evaluation on the GPU. We follow [Keeter 2020] and employ IA as the basis for local pruning of the function evaluation tree to minimize the required number of function evaluations, and we take advantage of GPU-parallelism to significantly enhance computational throughput.

Zoom: https://washington.zoom.us/j/92831331326

Notes: FPBench Community Minutes

Slack: Invite link

Hope to see y'all there :)