Tom, I've certainly been watching CUDA and other GPGPU interfaces for the better half of a decade now as that's been the hot topic for a while now. Especially at Siggraph, as anyone and everyone publishes a paper on how [insert_algorithm] is encoded for the GPU and suddenly runs [insert_speedup] faster. CUDA has the added benefit of being one of the first frameworks that was sufficiently abstracted to be actually sort of maintainable code on a stable interface.
As for leveraging it, there are actually lots of ways it could be put to work with varying levels of improvement. To highlight just a few that could potentially get a major speed boost include: NURBS surface evaluation, polynomial evaluation, the entire ray-tracing pipeline, CSG boolean evaluations, and most of our 1D/2D data processing tools. The issue thusfar (aside from not having a good stable maintainable interface before CUDA) has merely been that we have more need for new features than we have to improve the performance of existing routines. For portability, we have to have a non-CUDA interface regardless so utilizing most any GPGPU technique usually amounts to it being an (optional) optimization step. With the focus squarely on STEP conversion support, initial NURBS/BREP implementation, the Geometry Engine/Server, and a new modeling interface, that hasn't left much room to work on anything else. Cheers! Sean On Oct 29, 2008, at 3:03 AM, Tom Browder wrote: > Has anyone thought of ways the Nvidia GPU CUDA capability could be > useful with BRL-CAD? Operations on large matrices seem to be the most > likely but I'm not sure that applies anywhere here. Transformation > matrix operations I don't think are large enough to pay off using > CUDA. > > Regards, > > -Tom > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > --- > This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's > challenge > Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win > great prizes > Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in > the world > http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ > _______________________________________________ > BRL-CAD Developer mailing list > brlcad-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/brlcad-devel ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ BRL-CAD Developer mailing list brlcad-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/brlcad-devel
