A fast GPU Monte Carlo Radiative Heat Transfer Implementation for Coupling with Direct Numerical Simulation

We implemented a fast Reciprocal Monte Carlo algorithm, to accurately solve radiative heat transfer in turbulent flows of non-grey participating media that can be coupled to fully resolved turbulent flows, namely to Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS). The spectrally varying absorption coefficient is treated in a narrow-band fashion with a correlated-k distribution. The implementation is verified with analytical solutions and validated with results from literature and line-by-line Monte Carlo computations. The method is implemented on GPU with a thorough attention to memory transfer and computational efficiency. The bottlenecks that dominate the computational expenses are addressed and several techniques are proposed to optimize the GPU execution. By implementing the proposed algorithmic accelerations, a speed-up of up to 3 orders of magnitude can be achieved, while maintaining the same accuracy

Ray-traced radiative transfer on massively threaded architectures

In this thesis, I apply techniques from the field of computer graphics to ray tracing in astrophysical simulations, and introduce the grace software library. This is combined with an extant radiative transfer solver to produce a new package, taranis. It allows for fully-parallel particle updates via per-particle accumulation of rates, followed by a forward Euler integration step, and is manifestly photon-conserving. To my knowledge, taranis is the first ray-traced radiative transfer code to run on graphics processing units and target cosmological-scale smooth particle hydrodynamics (SPH) datasets. A significant optimization effort is undertaken in developing grace. Contrary to typical results in computer graphics, it is found that the bounding volume hierarchies (BVHs) used to accelerate the ray tracing procedure need not be of high quality; as a result, extremely fast BVH construction times are possible (< 0.02 microseconds per particle in an SPH dataset). I show that this exceeds the performance researchers might expect from CPU codes by at least an order of magnitude, and compares favourably to a state-of-the-art ray tracing solution. Similar results are found for the ray-tracing itself, where again techniques from computer graphics are examined for effectiveness with SPH datasets, and new optimizations proposed. For high per-source ray counts (≳ 104), grace can reduce ray tracing run times by up to two orders of magnitude compared to extant CPU solutions developed within the astrophysics community, and by a factor of a few compared to a state-of-the-art solution. taranis is shown to produce expected results in a suite of de facto cosmological radiative transfer tests cases. For some cases, it currently out-performs a serial, CPU-based alternative by a factor of a few. Unfortunately, for the most realistic test its performance is extremely poor, making the current taranis code unsuitable for cosmological radiative transfer. The primary reason for this failing is found to be a small minority of particles which always dominate the timestep criteria. Several plausible routes to mitigate this problem, while retaining parallelism, are put forward

Ray Tracing Gems

This book is a must-have for anyone serious about rendering in real time. With the announcement of new ray tracing APIs and hardware to support them, developers can easily create real-time applications with ray tracing as a core component. As ray tracing on the GPU becomes faster, it will play a more central role in real-time rendering. Ray Tracing Gems provides key building blocks for developers of games, architectural applications, visualizations, and more. Experts in rendering share their knowledge by explaining everything from nitty-gritty techniques that will improve any ray tracer to mastery of the new capabilities of current and future hardware. What you'll learn: The latest ray tracing techniques for developing real-time applications in multiple domains Guidance, advice, and best practices for rendering applications with Microsoft DirectX Raytracing (DXR) How to implement high-performance graphics for interactive visualizations, games, simulations, and more Who this book is for: Developers who are looking to leverage the latest APIs and GPU technology for real-time rendering and ray tracing Students looking to learn about best practices in these areas Enthusiasts who want to understand and experiment with their new GPU