Level of detail for complex urban scenes with varied animated crowds, using XML

We present a system capable of handling several thousands of varied animated characters within a crowd. These characters are designed to have geometric, color animation and behaviour variety, nevertheless when a crowd becomes bigger, more memory is needed and is often difficult to achieve this objective. To solve this problem, we implemented two complementary data structures

Atomism, teleology and causality: the principles in the critical materialism of Pierre Gassendi

A partir del contexto de la naciente filosofía moderna y de la Scientia nova del siglo XVII, el presente artículo se propone revisar la propuesta filosófica de Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) acerca de su concepto de materia, de la causalidad y del carácter teleológico de su filosofía natural. Principalmente, sostenemos que para interpretar adecuadamente la filosofía gassendiana se deben tener en cuenta los aspectos finalistas que recupera el pensador francés. En este sentido, para comprender la propuesta de Gassendi debemos, en primer lugar, ofrecer un marco introductorio respecto de la actividad intelectual en su época; en segundo lugar, vamos a exponer los principios atomistas y creacionistas de su materialismo más las consideraciones problemáticas que ellas traen; en tercer lugar, abordaremos la dimensión probabilista de su filosofía; en cuarto lugar, revisaremos la discusión gassendiana de las causas aristotélicas en la que se intenta la recuperación de la causa final. Finalmente, ofreceremos una interpretación del pensamiento de Gassendi que intente poner los elementos conceptuales básicos a tomar en consideración para comprender las tensiones filosóficas expresadas en su “téleo-mecanicismo” natural.From the context of Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientia Nova of Seventeenth-century, this article has the aim to review the philosophical proposal of Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) about his concept of matter, causality, and the teleological character of his Philosophy of Nature. In order to interpret with accuracy the philosophical ideas of Gassendi, we have to take the teleological issues into account. In order to understand Gassendi’s approach we offer, on first place, a theoretical framework introducing his intellectual activity; second, we study the atomistic and creationist principles of his materialism and his interpretative problems; third, we examine the probabilistic version of his philosophy; fourth, we expose the gassendian discussion about the Aristotelian principles of causality and his recovery of the final cause on the context of his theory of generation. Finally, we offer our interpretation of Gassendi’s ideas, trying to convey the basic conceptual elements required to understand the philosophical tensions expressed in his natural “teleo-mechanicism”

Marin Mersenne and Pierre Gassendi as Descartes’ Questioners

In the following pages, we will explore the proximity of Marin Mersenne and Pierre Gassendi’s arguments against Descartes’ Meditations. We will study how, in some of their objections, both Mersenne and Gassendi adopted a nominalist and an empiricist view regarding central topics in Cartesian epistemology, such as the idea of God, and the origin and classification of ideas in the mind. We propose that the assessment of the confrontation between the two objectors and Descartes may provide us a better picture of the complex intellectual debates that took place at the very beginnings of modern philosophy

En la época de la fábula del mundo: de la poesía cosmológica de Du Bartas a la imaginación filosófica de Descartes

In the following pages, I propose to start from a broad time frame, here named The Age of the Fable of the World, to reflect on the specific intellectual episode that goes from the publication of Guillaume Salluste du Bartas's cosmological poetry, to René Descartes's Le Monde ou le traité de la lumière. First, I will try to emphasize the views that, from the perspective of cosmological poetry, make an assessment of natural philosophy as a speculation that feigns a tale or fable of the world. Second, I will point out Michel de Montaigne's and Francis Bacon's critical arguments against philosophical imagination, in its eagerness to construct these fictional accounts of the cosmos. Third, I will characterize the principles of the Cartesian fable of the world by identifying its epistemic, physical, and metaphysical dimensions. Finally, I will consider the tensions in Descartes’ principles that lead to the assessment of his natural philosophy as an eminently speculative theory.En las siguientes páginas propongo partir de un amplio marco temporal, llamado aquí la época de la fábula del mundo, para reflexionar en torno al episodio intelectual específico que va de la publicación de la poesía cosmológica de Guillaume Salluste du Bartas a la de Le Monde ou le traité de la lumière de René Descartes. En primer lugar, enfatizaré los puntos de vista que, desde la perspectiva de la poesía cosmológica, conciben a la filosofía natural como una especulación que finge un relato o fábula del mundo. En segundo lugar, señalaré las posturas críticas de Michel de Montaigne y de Francis Bacon a la imaginación filosófica por el afán que tiene de construir estos relatos ficticios del cosmos. En tercer lugar, caracterizaré los principios de la fábula cartesiana del mundo, identificando sus dimensiones epistémicas, físicas y metafísicas. Finalmente, consideraré las tensiones de los principios de Descartes que conllevan a la valoración de su filosofía natural como una teoría eminentemente especulativa

Static Graphs for Coding Productivity in OpenACC

The main contribution of this work is to increase the coding productivity for GPU programming by using the concept of Static Graphs. To do so, we have combined the new CUDA Graph API with the OpenACC programming model. We use as test cases a well-known and widely used problems in HPC and AI: the Particle Swarm Optimization. We complement the OpenACC functionality with the use of CUDA Graph, achieving accelerations of more than one order of magnitude, and a performance very close to a reference and optimized CUDA code. Finally, we propose a new specification to incorporate the concept of Static Graphs into the OpenACC specification.This project has received funding from the EPEEC project from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program under grant agreement No. 801051.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Towards enhancing coding productivity for GPU programming using static graphs

The main contribution of this work is to increase the coding productivity of GPU programming by using the concept of Static Graphs. GPU capabilities have been increasing significantly in terms of performance and memory capacity. However, there are still some problems in terms of scalability and limitations to the amount of work that a GPU can perform at a time. To minimize the overhead associated with the launch of GPU kernels, as well as to maximize the use of GPU capacity, we have combined the new CUDA Graph API with the CUDA programming model (including CUDA math libraries) and the OpenACC programming model. We use as test cases two different, well-known and widely used problems in HPC and AI: the Conjugate Gradient method and the Particle Swarm Optimization. In the first test case (Conjugate Gradient) we focus on the integration of Static Graphs with CUDA. In this case, we are able to significantly outperform the NVIDIA reference code, reaching an acceleration of up to 11× thanks to a better implementation, which can benefit from the new CUDA Graph capabilities. In the second test case (Particle Swarm Optimization), we complement the OpenACC functionality with the use of CUDA Graph, achieving again accelerations of up to one order of magnitude, with average speedups ranging from 2× to 4×, and performance very close to a reference and optimized CUDA code. Our main target is to achieve a higher coding productivity model for GPU programming by using Static Graphs, which provides, in a very transparent way, a better exploitation of the GPU capacity. The combination of using Static Graphs with two of the current most important GPU programming models (CUDA and OpenACC) is able to reduce considerably the execution time w.r.t. the use of CUDA and OpenACC only, achieving accelerations of up to more than one order of magnitude. Finally, we propose an interface to incorporate the concept of Static Graphs into the OpenACC Specifications.his research was funded by EPEEC project from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program under grant agreement No. 801051. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy (DOE). The US government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for US government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan, accessed on 13 April 2022).Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Tasking in accelerators: performance evaluation

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.In this work, we analyze the implications and results of implementing dynamic parallelism, concurrent kernels and CUDA Graphs to solve task-oriented problems. As a benchmark we propose three different methods for solving DGEMM operation on tiled-matrices; which might be the most popular benchmark for performance analysis. For the algorithms that we study, we present significant differences in terms of data dependencies, synchronization and granularity. The main contribution of this work is determining which of the previous approaches work better for having multiple task running concurrently in a single GPU, as well as stating the main limitations and benefits of every technique. Using dynamic parallelism and CUDA Streams we were able to achieve up to 30% speedups and for CUDA Graph API up to 25x acceleration outperforming state of the art results.This project has received funding from the EPEEC project from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 801051, from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the project Computación de Altas Prestaciones VII ( TIN2015-65316-P ) and the Departament d’Innovació, Universitats i Empresa de la Generalitat de Catalunya, under project MPEXPAR: Models de Pro-gramació i Entorns d’Execució Paral·lels (2014-SGR-1051 ). Finally, this project also received funding from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the Juan de la Cierva Grant Agreement No IJCI-2017-33511 , and from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska Curie grant agreement No. 749516 .Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Robert Boyle y John Locke: mecanicismo, percepción y teoría de las ideas

The aim of this paper is to discuss the assumptions and implications of the new mechanistic ontology of two philosophers representatives of natural philosophy of the seventeenth century, John Locke and Robert Boyle. Three common characteristics are analyzed: first, we will discuss the thesis about the theory of ideas; We try to show how both proposals agree to establish, on the one hand, a research methodology of nature according to the principles or limits Baconian inspiration and a "constructive skepticism". Second, we attend the vicinity between the theses of both philosophers around mechanistic explanation and reduced-corpuscularista qualities and ways. Here the principles for the new science will address both Locke and Boyle argued, while both thinkers tried to give a critical sense of the traditional concepts of "essence", "form" and "quality". Finally, we will discuss the proposals can be found in both natural philosophers in regard to their theories of perception, concluding that there is a genuine epistemological and ontological proposal, the results were expressed in the new directions that took natural philosophy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.El objetivo de este trabajo es el de discutir las asunciones y consecuencias de la nueva ontología mecanicista de dos filósofos representantes de la filosofía natural del siglo XVII: John Locke y Robert Boyle. Se analizarán tres características comunes: en primer lugar, abordaremos las tesis acerca de la teoría de las ideas; trataremos de mostrar el modo en que ambas propuestas coinciden al establecer, por un lado, una metodología de investigación de la naturaleza acorde a los principios o límites de inspiración baconiana y otra “escéptica constructiva”. En segundo lugar, atenderemos las cercanías entre las tesis de ambos filósofos en torno a la explicación y la reducción mecanicista-corpuscularista de las cualidades y las formas. Aquí se abordará los principios para la Nueva ciencia, que tanto Locke como Boyle sostuvieron, en tanto que ambos pensadores trataban de dar un sentido crítico a las concepciones tradicionales de “esencia”, “forma” y “cualidad”. Finalmente, nos ocuparemos de las propuestas que se pueden encontrar en ambos filósofos naturales en lo que respecta a sus teorías de la percepción, concluyendo que existe una auténtica propuesta epistémica y ontológica, cuyos resultados se expresaron en los nuevos rumbos que adquirió la filosofía natural durante los siglos XVII y XVIII