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In the past, graphics processors were special purpose hardwired application accelerators, suitable only for conventional rasterization-style graphics applications. Modern GPUs are now fully programmable, massively parallel floating point processors. This talk will describe NVIDIA's massively multithreaded computing architecture and CUDA software for GPU computing. The architecture is a scalable, highly parallel architecture that delivers high throughput for data-intensive processing. Although not truly general-purpose processors, GPUs can now be used for a wide variety of compute-intensive applications beyond graphics.

58 communications of th e ac m | n ov e m b e r 2 0 1 0 | vo l . 5 3 | n o. 1 1 contributed articles understanding throughputoriented architectures

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We describe a new approach to ray tracing which drastically reduces the number of ray-object and ray-bounds intersection calculations by means of 5-dimensional space subdivision.Collections of rays originating from a common 3D rectangular volume and directed through a 2D solid angle are represented as hypercubes in 5-space. A 5D volume bounding the space of rays is dynamically subdivided into hypercubes, each linked to a set of objects which are candidates for intersection. Rays are classified into unique hypercubes and checked for intersection with the associated candidate object set. We compare several techniques for object extent testing, including boxes, spheres, plane-sets, and convex polyhedra. In addition, we examine optirnizations made possible by the directional nature of the algorithm, such as sorting, caching and backface culling. Results indicate that this algorithm significantly outperforms previous ray tracing techniques, especially for complex environments.