GPGPU |
General-Purpose Computation Using Graphics Hardware
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IntroductionGPGPU stands for General-Purpose computation on GPUs. With the increasing programmability of commodity graphics processing units (GPUs), these chips are capable of performing more than the specific graphics computations for which they were designed. They are now capable coprocessors, and their high speed makes them useful for a variety of applications. The goal of this page is to catalog the current and historical use of GPUs for general-purpose computation.
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This paper by Valerio Pascucci describes a simple technique to compute isosurfaces on programmable GPUs. Given the vertices of a tetrahedron a simple vertex program computes the position of the vertices, normal and connectivity of the potential portion of an isosurface contained in the tetrahedron (a marching tet approach). One main advantage of this technique is to offload the CPU of the task of computing the isosurface and more importantly to avoid storing the surface in main memory. Interestingly, one could compile a display list for a tetrahedral mesh and display different isosurfaces by changing an OpenGL parameter and always rendering the same list. The paper presents and comments in detail all the source code of the vertex program. ( Isosurface Computation Made Simple: Hardware Acceleration, Adaptive Refinement and Tetrahedral Stripping. V. Pascucci, Proceedings of VisSym 2004)
Posted: 03 May 2004 [GPGPU /Computational Geometry/Surfaces and Modeling] # |
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