34,425 research outputs found
Fat vs. thin threading approach on GPUs: application to stochastic simulation of chemical reactions
We explore two different threading approaches on a graphics processing unit (GPU) exploiting two different characteristics of the current GPU architecture. The fat thread approach tries to minimise data access time by relying on shared memory and registers potentially sacrificing parallelism. The thin thread approach maximises parallelism and tries to hide access latencies. We apply these two approaches to the parallel stochastic simulation of chemical reaction systems using the stochastic simulation algorithm (SSA) by Gillespie (J. Phys. Chem, Vol. 81, p. 2340-2361, 1977). In these cases, the proposed thin thread approach shows comparable performance while eliminating the limitation of the reaction system’s size
Video Interpolation using Optical Flow and Laplacian Smoothness
Non-rigid video interpolation is a common computer vision task. In this paper
we present an optical flow approach which adopts a Laplacian Cotangent Mesh
constraint to enhance the local smoothness. Similar to Li et al., our approach
adopts a mesh to the image with a resolution up to one vertex per pixel and
uses angle constraints to ensure sensible local deformations between image
pairs. The Laplacian Mesh constraints are expressed wholly inside the optical
flow optimization, and can be applied in a straightforward manner to a wide
range of image tracking and registration problems. We evaluate our approach by
testing on several benchmark datasets, including the Middlebury and Garg et al.
datasets. In addition, we show application of our method for constructing 3D
Morphable Facial Models from dynamic 3D data
ChainQueen: A Real-Time Differentiable Physical Simulator for Soft Robotics
Physical simulators have been widely used in robot planning and control.
Among them, differentiable simulators are particularly favored, as they can be
incorporated into gradient-based optimization algorithms that are efficient in
solving inverse problems such as optimal control and motion planning.
Simulating deformable objects is, however, more challenging compared to rigid
body dynamics. The underlying physical laws of deformable objects are more
complex, and the resulting systems have orders of magnitude more degrees of
freedom and therefore they are significantly more computationally expensive to
simulate. Computing gradients with respect to physical design or controller
parameters is typically even more computationally challenging. In this paper,
we propose a real-time, differentiable hybrid Lagrangian-Eulerian physical
simulator for deformable objects, ChainQueen, based on the Moving Least Squares
Material Point Method (MLS-MPM). MLS-MPM can simulate deformable objects
including contact and can be seamlessly incorporated into inference, control
and co-design systems. We demonstrate that our simulator achieves high
precision in both forward simulation and backward gradient computation. We have
successfully employed it in a diverse set of control tasks for soft robots,
including problems with nearly 3,000 decision variables.Comment: In submission to ICRA 2019. Supplemental Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IWD4iGIsB4 Project Page:
https://github.com/yuanming-hu/ChainQuee
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