User:Vasco.costa/GSoC15/proposal

Hello. I am interested in ray-tracing, and GPGPU. I plan to work on OpenCL (OCL) acceleration of the BRL-CAD librt rendering pipeline.

Project Information

Links to code or algorithms

• Lagae, Ares, and Philip Dutré. Compact, "Fast and Robust Grids for Ray Tracing." Computer Graphics Forum. Vol. 27. No. 4. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008.
• 3D Object Intersection - Real-Time Rendering Resources.
• OpenCL API 1.2 Reference Card.

Deliverables

• M1 - patch with ell and arb8 shot routines in OCL.
• M2 - patch to refactor dispatcher, shoot, optical renderer to process many rays in parallel in C when rendering an image or block.
• M3 - patch with grid spatial partitioning in OCL.
• M4 - patch to add GPU side database storage of OCL implemented primitives.
• M5 - patch to port compute intensive or critical parts of the dispatcher, boolean evaluation, optical renderer to OCL.
• M6 - patch with tor and tgc shot routines in OCL.
• M7 - patch with bot shot routine in OCL.

Development Schedule

• 1 week - ellipsoid (ell), arb8 (arbitrary polyhedron) shot routines in OCL
• 1 week - to refactor dispatcher, shoot, optical renderer to process many rays in parallel in C when rendering an image or block
• 3 weeks - grid spatial partitioning in OCL
• 2 weeks - to code for GPU side database storage of OCL implemented primitives
• 3 weeks - to port the compute intensive or critical parts of the dispatcher, boolean evaluator, optical renderer to OCL
• 1 week - torus (tor), truncated general cone (tgc) shot routines in OCL
• 2 weeks - bot (bag o' triangles) shot routine in OCL

Code should be implemented in C and OpenCL. The boolean weaving should be implemented in the 3 week segment where the boolean evaluator will be reimplemented in OCL. bot implementation is near the end because it might be possible to reuse some of the spatial partitioning code in it.

Why BRL-CAD? Why me?

I chose BRL-CAD because I think it is an important project. We currently are experiencing a large boom in desktop manufacturing tools such as lowcost CNC machines and 3D printers. BRL-CAD is one of the few open-source projects operating in this space. In addition BRL-CAD relies extensively on computer graphics ray tracing algorithms to perform this task and I have considerable experience to bring to bear on these problems. Last but not least I have experience with open source development, administration, and culture.

Personal Information

Name

Vasco Alexandre da Silva Costa

Webpage

http://web.ist.utl.pt/vasco.costa

IRC username

vasc

Brief background info

I am a PhD student at Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal. The background is computer graphics. In particular in the area of real-time ray tracing on GPGPUs. At one time I was a project maintainer of Freeciv (an open source real-time strategy game). Before the maintainer post I was a developer. I coded a graphic game client, improved the TCP/IP networking, and the game rule inference engine processing.