Abe Stephens

Design for Parallel Interactive Ray Tracing Systems

We describe the software architecture of the Manta interactive ray tracer and describe its application in engineering and scientific visualization. Although numerous ray tracing software packages have been developed, much of the traditional design wisdom needs to be updated to provide support for interactivity, high degrees of parallelism, and modern packet-based acceleration structures. We discuss situations that are normally not considered when designing a batch ray tracer and present methods to overcome those challenges. This paper advocates a forward looking programming model for interactive ray tracing that uses reconfigurable components to achieve flexibility while achieving scalability on large numbers of processors. Manta employs data structures motivated by modern microprocessor design that can exploit instruction-level parallelism. We discuss the design tradeoffs and the performance achieved for this system

An application of scalable massive model interaction using shared-memory systems

During the end-to-end digital design of a commerical airliner, a massive amount of geometric data is produced. This data can be used for inspection or maintenance throughout the life of the aircraft. Massive model interactive ray tracing can provide maintenance personnel with the capability to easily visualize the entire aircraft at once. This paper describes the design of the renderer used to demonstrate the feasibility of integrating interactive ray tracing in a commerical aircraft inspection and maintenance scenario. We describe the feasibility demonstration involving actual personnel performing real-world tasks and the scalable architecture of the parallel shared memory renderer.

Exploring a Boeing 777: Ray Tracing Large-Scale CAD Data

This article describes the application of ray tracing to several aircraft manufacturing scenarios. Todays computer-aided design frameworks and techniques are extensively applied in virtually all industrial engineering design projects. The emergence of modeling systems powerful enough to manage an entire geometric project database has made it possible to design complete airplanes, ships, cars, and so on, digitally. Such large-scale projects over their duration generate vast amounts of data. While CAD systems allow modeling of individual components, the complexity of geometric design data is increasing faster than the capabilities of full model visualization tools.

Massive model visualization techniques: course notes

Interactive display and visualization of large geometric and textured models is becoming a fundamental capability. There are numerous application areas, including games, movies, CAD, virtual prototyping, and scientific visualization. One of observations about geometric models used in interactive applications is that their model complexity continues to increase because of fundamental advances in 3D modeling, simulation, and data capture technologies. As computing power increases, users take advantage of the algorithmic advances and generate even more complex models and datasets. Therefore, there are many cases where we are required to visualize massive models that consist of hundreds of millions of triangles and, even, billions of triangles. However, interactive visualization and handling of such massive models still remains a challenge in computer graphics and visualization. In this monograph we discuss various techniques that enable interactive visualization of massive models. These techniques include visibility computation, simplification, levels-of-detail, and cache-coherent data management. We believe that the combinations of these techniques can make it possible to interactively visualize massive models in commodity hardware.

Real Time Interactive Massive Model Visualization

Real-time interaction with complex models has always challenged interactive computer graphics. Such models can easily contain gigabytes of data. This tutorial covers state-ofthe-art techniques that remove current memory and performance constraints. This allows a fundamental change in visualization systems: users can interact with huge models in real time.

OverView: A Framework for Generic Online Visualization of Distributed Systems

Visualizing, testing and debugging distributed systems is a challenging task that is not well ad- dressed by conventional software tools. OverView, an event-based Eclipse plug-in that provides runtime visualization of systems running on distributed Java virtual machines is presented. In the same way that the coding and debugging tools in Eclipse make writing software more accessible by visually representing both a programs static components: packages, classes, and interfaces, as well as a programs dynamic components: objects, threads, and invocation stacks; OverView in- tends to make distributed systems more accessible to programmers by creating an analogous visual workspace with appropriate abstractions for distributed component naming, state, location, remote communication, and migration. Overview is a generic visualization framework that uses an Entity Specification Language (ESL) to enable developers to map high-level concurrency and distribution abstractions into lower-level Java threads, network connections and objects.

Bullet Ray Vision

Prior to 2000 ray tracing was typically considered an expensive computation. As a result, many developers strove to minimize the cost of ray tracing in their applications. Today many older applications can be substantially improved by being re-designed to take advantage of modern, faster ray tracing algorithms. This work examines the integration of modern ray tracing techniques with a classic ballistic penetration algorithm and demonstrates the benefit gained. We also present a unique visualization of the ballistic penetration.