IBM Center for Advanced Studies Project: Ray-Tracing Enhacements for the CELL Processor

Real-time ray tracing has experienced a tremendous speed-up in the last decade but satisfactory performance on a single computer is still more than an order of magnitude away. Even though a number of hardware architectures have been proposed to close this gap, none of them currently presents a viable solution. The most prominent reasons are the effort spent on designing custom programmable units, too narrow focus on classical recursive ray tracing, and an emphasis on a completely separate add-on card or system.

Within this project we develop and alternative platform in the context of Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell/B.E.) processor. This platform contains custom hardware ray tracing units based on the DRPU architecture, enhancements to the CELL/B.E. processor itself as well as novel software infrastructure to support them.

Contact:

Lukas Marsalek
Email: marsalek at cs dot uni-saarland dot de
Tel: +49 681 302 3836
URL: http://graphics.cs.uni-saarland.de/marsalek/