Coherent Raytracing

Contact "brlcad" on irc.freenode.net

BRL-CAD has one of the oldest and fastest parallel ray tracing implementations around but we don't currently leverage modern techniques that minimize context switching and data access. With implicit geometry and constructive solid geometry (CSG) Boolean operations, we also have a very different approach to ray tracing that has its own set of academic challenges.

Your project is to help us introduce a data-coherent pipeline into BRL-CAD using ray bundling, packet tracing, and cache-coherent processing. Currently, the ray tracer shoots one ray at a time. Your objective is to make it shoot postage stamps at a time (e.g., 32x32) while evaluating all of those rays simultaneously.

Difficulty: Medium to Hard

Languages: C