2,021 research outputs found
From Big Data to Big Displays: High-Performance Visualization at Blue Brain
Blue Brain has pushed high-performance visualization (HPV) to complement its
HPC strategy since its inception in 2007. In 2011, this strategy has been
accelerated to develop innovative visualization solutions through increased
funding and strategic partnerships with other research institutions.
We present the key elements of this HPV ecosystem, which integrates C++
visualization applications with novel collaborative display systems. We
motivate how our strategy of transforming visualization engines into services
enables a variety of use cases, not only for the integration with high-fidelity
displays, but also to build service oriented architectures, to link into web
applications and to provide remote services to Python applications.Comment: ISC 2017 Visualization at Scale worksho
Real-time Monitoring of Uncertainty due to Refraction in Multibeam Echo Sounding
A software toolkit has been developed to objectively monitor uncertainty due to refraction in multibeam echosounding, specifically mapping systems that employ underway sound speed profiling hardware. The toolkit relies on the use of a raytrace simulator which mimics the sounding geometry of any given echosounder, specifically array type, angular sector, draft, and availability of a surface sound speed probe. The simulator works by objectively comparing a pair of consecutively collected sound speed profiles and reporting sounding uncertainty across the entire potential sounding space. Realtime visualizations of the uncertainty as a function of time and space allow the operator to tune the sound speed profile collection regime to maintain a desired sounding uncertainty while at the same time minimizing the number of casts collected
Review of simulating four classes of window materials for daylighting with non-standard BSDF using the simulation program Radiance
This review describes the currently available simulation models for window
material to calculate daylighting with the program "Radiance". The review is
based on four abstract and general classes of window materials, depending on
their scattering and redirecting properties (bidirectional scatter distribution
function, BSDF). It lists potential and limits of the older models and includes
the most recent additions to the software. All models are demonstrated using an
exemplary indoor scene and two typical sky conditions. It is intended as
clarification for applying window material models in project work or teaching.
The underlying algorithmic problems apply to all lighting simulation programs,
so the scenarios of materials and skies are applicable to other lighting
programs
Weakly supervised 3D Reconstruction with Adversarial Constraint
Supervised 3D reconstruction has witnessed a significant progress through the
use of deep neural networks. However, this increase in performance requires
large scale annotations of 2D/3D data. In this paper, we explore inexpensive 2D
supervision as an alternative for expensive 3D CAD annotation. Specifically, we
use foreground masks as weak supervision through a raytrace pooling layer that
enables perspective projection and backpropagation. Additionally, since the 3D
reconstruction from masks is an ill posed problem, we propose to constrain the
3D reconstruction to the manifold of unlabeled realistic 3D shapes that match
mask observations. We demonstrate that learning a log-barrier solution to this
constrained optimization problem resembles the GAN objective, enabling the use
of existing tools for training GANs. We evaluate and analyze the manifold
constrained reconstruction on various datasets for single and multi-view
reconstruction of both synthetic and real images
Lightweight Carbon Fiber Mirrors for Solar Concentrator Applications
Lightweight parabolic mirrors for solar concentrators have been fabricated
using carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) and a nanometer scale optical
surface smoothing technique. The smoothing technique improved the surface
roughness of the CFRP surface from ~3 {\mu}m root mean square (RMS) for as-cast
to ~5 nm RMS after smoothing. The surfaces were then coated with metal, which
retained the sub-wavelength surface roughness, to produce a high-quality
specular reflector. The mirrors were tested in an 11x geometrical concentrator
configuration and achieved an optical efficiency of 78% under an AM0 solar
simulator. With further development, lightweight CFRP mirrors will enable
dramatic improvements in the specific power, power per unit mass, achievable
for concentrated photovoltaics in space.Comment: IEEE Photovoltaic Specialist Conference (PVSC), DC, USA, 201
Out-of-Core GPU Path Tracing on Large Instanced Scenes via Geometry Streaming
We present a technique for out-of-core GPU path tracing of arbitrarily large scenes that is compatible with hardware-accelerated ray-tracing. Our technique improves upon previous works by subdividing the scene spatially into streamable chunks that are loaded using a priority system that maximizes ray throughput and minimizes GPU memory usage. This allows for arbitrarily large scaling of scene complexity. Our system required under 19 minutes to render a solid color version of Disney\u27s Moana Island scene (39.3 million instances, 261.1 million unique quads, and 82.4 billion instanced quads at a resolution of 1024x429 and 1024spp on an RTX 5000 (24GB memory total, 22GB used, 13GB geometry cache, with the remainder for temporary buffers and storage) (Wald et al.). As a scalability test, our system rendered 26 Moana Island scenes without multi-level instancing (1.02 billion instances, 2.14 trillion instanced quads, ~230GB if all resident) in under 1h:28m. Compared to state-of-the-art hardware-accelerated renders of the Moana Island scene, our system can render larger scenes on a single GPU. Our system is faster than the previous out-of-core approach and is able to render larger scenes than previous in-core approaches given the same memory constraints (Hellmuth, Zellman et al, Wald)
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