Lecture-Tuesday, April 20, 1999 TOMORROW!

[Abbeygail Lynn Talbot]

UNIVERSITY OF UTAH
COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT
STUDENT RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

Tuesday, April 20 1999
101 EMCB

Refreshments 3:25 PM
Lecture 3:40 PM

Interactive Ray Tracing

Steven Parker

Interactive rendering systems provide a powerful way to convey information,
especially for complex environments. Until recently the only interactive
rendering algorithms were hardware-accelerated polygonal renderers. This
approach has limitations due to both the algorithms used and the tight coupling
to the hardware. Software-only implementations are more easily modified and
extended which enables experimentation with various rendering and interaction
options.

We will explore an interactive ray tracing system designed for current
multiprocessor machines. This system was initially developed to examine ray
tracing's performance on a modern architecture. We were surprised at just how
responsive the resulting system turned out to be. Although the system takes
careful advantage of system resources, it is essentially a brute force
implementation. We intentionally take the simple path wherever feasible at each
step believing that neither limiting assumptions nor complex algorithms are
needed for performance and parallelism.

We will demonstrate the system used for rendering tradition computer graphics
scenes. We will also discuss how this system is used to visualize large-scale
(gigabyte) datasets interactively. To gain efficiency several optimizations are
used including a volume bricking scheme and a shallow data hierarchy. These
optimizations are used in several different visualization algorithms.

This talk will include discussions of computer graphics, scientific
visualization, parallel programming, and computer architecture and software
systems. No previous expertise in any of these areas will be required.

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Abbey Talbot
Secretary
50 S. Central Campus Drive
3190 MEB
Salt Lake City, UT 84112-9205
(801)581-8224
(801)581-5843,fax
tal...@cs.utah.edu