259 research outputs found
Exposure Render: An Interactive Photo-Realistic Volume Rendering Framework
The field of volume visualization has undergone rapid development during the past years, both due to advances in suitable computing hardware and due to the increasing availability of large volume datasets. Recent work has focused on increasing the visual realism in Direct Volume Rendering (DVR) by integrating a number of visually plausible but often effect-specific rendering techniques, for instance modeling of light occlusion and depth of field. Besides yielding more attractive renderings, especially the more realistic lighting has a positive effect on perceptual tasks. Although these new rendering techniques yield impressive results, they exhibit limitations in terms of their exibility and their performance. Monte Carlo ray tracing (MCRT), coupled with physically based light transport, is the de-facto standard for synthesizing highly realistic images in the graphics domain, although usually not from volumetric data. Due to the stochastic sampling of MCRT algorithms, numerous effects can be achieved in a relatively straight-forward fashion. For this reason, we have developed a practical framework that applies MCRT techniques also to direct volume rendering (DVR). With this work, we demonstrate that a host of realistic effects, including physically based lighting, can be simulated in a generic and flexible fashion, leading to interactive DVR with improved realism. In the hope that this improved approach to DVR will see more use in practice, we have made available our framework under a permissive open source license
GPU Acceleration of a Non-Standard Finite Element Mesh Truncation Technique for Electromagnetics
The emergence of General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) provides new opportunities to accelerate applications involving a large number of regular computations. However, properly leveraging the computational resources of graphical processors is a very challenging task. In this paper, we use this kind of device to parallelize FE-IIEE (Finite Element-Iterative Integral Equation Evaluation), a non-standard finite element mesh truncation technique introduced by two of the authors. This application is computationally very demanding due to the amount, size and complexity of the data involved in the procedure. Besides, an efficient implementation becomes even more difficult if the parallelization has to maintain the complex workflow of the original code. The proposed implementation using CUDA applies different optimization techniques to improve performance. These include leveraging the fastest memories of the GPU and increasing the granularity of the computations to reduce the impact of memory access. We have applied our parallel algorithm to two real radiation and scattering problems demonstrating speedups higher than 140 on a state-of-the-art GPU.This work was supported in part by the Spanish Government under Grant TEC2016-80386-P, Grant TIN2017-82972-R,
and Grant ESP2015-68245-C4-1-P, and in part by the Valencian Regional Government under Grant PROMETEO/2019/109
Compression, Modeling, and Real-Time Rendering of Realistic Materials and Objects
The realism of a scene basically depends on the quality of the geometry, the
illumination and the materials that are used. Whereas many sources for
the creation of three-dimensional geometry exist and numerous algorithms
for the approximation of global illumination were presented, the acquisition
and rendering of realistic materials remains a challenging problem.
Realistic materials are very important in computer graphics, because
they describe the reflectance properties of surfaces, which are based on the
interaction of light and matter. In the real world, an enormous diversity of
materials can be found, comprising very different properties. One important
objective in computer graphics is to understand these processes, to formalize
them and to finally simulate them.
For this purpose various analytical models do already exist, but their
parameterization remains difficult as the number of parameters is usually
very high. Also, they fail for very complex materials that occur in the real
world. Measured materials, on the other hand, are prone to long acquisition
time and to huge input data size. Although very efficient statistical
compression algorithms were presented, most of them do not allow for editability,
such as altering the diffuse color or mesostructure. In this thesis,
a material representation is introduced that makes it possible to edit these
features. This makes it possible to re-use the acquisition results in order to
easily and quickly create deviations of the original material. These deviations
may be subtle, but also substantial, allowing for a wide spectrum of
material appearances.
The approach presented in this thesis is not based on compression, but on
a decomposition of the surface into several materials with different reflection
properties. Based on a microfacette model, the light-matter interaction is
represented by a function that can be stored in an ordinary two-dimensional
texture. Additionally, depth information, local rotations, and the diffuse
color are stored in these textures. As a result of the decomposition, some
of the original information is inevitably lost, therefore an algorithm for the
efficient simulation of subsurface scattering is presented as well.
Another contribution of this work is a novel perception-based simplification
metric that includes the material of an object. This metric comprises
features of the human visual system, for example trichromatic color
perception or reduced resolution. The proposed metric allows for a more
aggressive simplification in regions where geometric metrics do not simplif
Adaptive heterogeneous parallelism for semi-empirical lattice dynamics in computational materials science.
With the variability in performance of the multitude of parallel environments available today, the conceptual overhead created by the need to anticipate runtime information to make design-time decisions has become overwhelming. Performance-critical applications and libraries carry implicit assumptions based on incidental metrics that are not portable to emerging computational platforms or even alternative contemporary architectures. Furthermore, the significance of runtime concerns such as makespan, energy efficiency and fault tolerance depends on the situational context. This thesis presents a case study in the application of both Mattsons prescriptive pattern-oriented approach and the more principled structured parallelism formalism to the computational simulation of inelastic neutron scattering spectra on hybrid CPU/GPU platforms. The original ad hoc implementation as well as new patternbased and structured implementations are evaluated for relative performance and scalability. Two new structural abstractions are introduced to facilitate adaptation by lazy optimisation and runtime feedback. A deferred-choice abstraction represents a unified space of alternative structural program variants, allowing static adaptation through model-specific exhaustive calibration with regards to the extrafunctional concerns of runtime, average instantaneous power and total energy usage. Instrumented queues serve as mechanism for structural composition and provide a representation of extrafunctional state that allows realisation of a market-based decentralised coordination heuristic for competitive resource allocation and the Lyapunov drift algorithm for cooperative scheduling
Stability of domain walls with biased initial conditions and their signatures in the CMB cosmic birefringence
Tohoku University博士(理学)thesi
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