Larry Seiler

Larrabee: A Many-Core x86 Architecture for Visual Computing

The Larrabee many-core visual computing architecture uses multiple in-order x86 cores augmented by wide vector processor units, together with some fixed-function logic. This increases the architectures programmability as compared to standard GPUs. The article describes the Larrabee architecture, a software renderer optimized for it, and other highly parallel applications. The article analyzes performance through scalability studies based on real-world workloads.

Mapping High-Fidelity Volume Rendering for Medical Imaging to CPU, GPU and Many-Core Architectures

Medical volumetric imaging requires high fidelity, high performance rendering algorithms. We motivate and analyze new volumetric rendering algorithms that are suited to modern parallel processing architectures. First, we describe the three major categories of volume rendering algorithms and confirm through an imaging scientist-guided evaluation that ray-casting is the most acceptable. We describe a thread- and data-parallel implementation of ray-casting that makes it amenable to key architectural trends of three modern commodity parallel architectures: multi-core, GPU, and an upcoming many-core Intelreg architecture code-named Larrabee. We achieve more than an order of magnitude performance improvement on a number of large 3D medical datasets. We further describe a data compression scheme that significantly reduces data-transfer overhead. This allows our approach to scale well to large numbers of Larrabee cores.