CSR: III: CGV: Medium: Architectures for Energy Efficient Ray Tracing

CSR：III：CGV：中：节能光线追踪架构

• 批准号: 1409129
• 负责人: Cem Yuksel
• 金额: $ 60万
• 依托单位: University of Utah
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-10-01 至 2019-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1409129&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CSR; III; CGV; Medium; Architectures

Computer graphics have become an integral part of nearly all modern computing devices. These machines range from high-performance systems, scientific workstations, and desktop computers, to dedicated gaming consoles, and to mobile electronics such as laptops, tablets, and phones. All of these devices have dedicated accelerators that enable high-performance 3D graphics. However, these accelerators, known as graphics processing units - GPUs, are becoming limited by power consumption and associated thermal issues. Improvements in process technology can help reduce energy requirements as chips migrate to the new processes, but in computer graphics, scene complexity and new demands for image quality are ever increasing. This places new demands on the GPU, and conspires to keep the power/thermal envelope high regardless of whether the GPUs are deployed in desktop workstations or energy constrained mobile platforms. This project aims to address this problem by developing new algorithms and new architectures for highly realistic 3D computer graphic image synthesis that consume significantly less power than current GPU growth trends.This work is to target ray tracing as a rendering algorithm. Ray tracing has well-understood advantages in supporting realistic rendering with high quality composite global lighting effects. It is also highly amenable to parallel processing, albeit utilizing a different type of parallelism than offered by current commercial GPUs. Ray tracing can also be naturally throttled to adjust the image quality given real-time temporal or energy constraints. This is much more difficult with the Z-buffer based rendering techniques used by current commercial GPUs. Starting from a proven framework with lightweight multiple-instruction, multiple-data (MIMD) thread processors that perform well with computations that are not efficiently executed in single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) bundles, the plan is to simultaneously develop new architectures and new algorithms that will work together to produce images with a lower energy cost.Expected primary contributions of the overall project include: a detailed examination of the energy required to render images with various lighting effects; techniques for trading off image quality, energy, and rendering speed through ray throttling and hardware-assisted frameless rending techniques; memory system enhancements to reduce data movement and the associated energy cost; novel extensions of our recent work in data streaming and runtime pipeline reconfiguration in many parts of the ray tracing algorithm; algorithmic improvements that take advantage of our custom architecture. If successful, this work has the potential to change fundamentally the way that computer graphics is delivered to a huge variety of end users. The promise of improved image quality and lower energy costs could change the way we experience graphics on future computing devices.

计算机图形已成为几乎所有现代计算设备的组成部分。这些机器的范围从高性能系统，科学工作站和台式计算机到专用游戏机以及笔记本电脑，平板电脑和电话等移动电子产品。所有这些设备都具有启用高性能3D图形的专用加速器。但是，这些被称为图形处理单元的加速器（GPU）受到功耗和相关热问题的限制。随着芯片迁移到新过程，过程技术的改进可以帮助减少能源需求，但是在计算机图形，场景复杂性和对图像质量的新需求中正在增加。这对GPU提出了新的需求，并且无论GPU是部署在台式机工作站还是能量约束的移动平台中，都可以密谋保持功率/热封底高。该项目旨在通过开发新的算法和新的架构来解决这一问题，以实现高度现实的3D计算机图形图像合成，这些图形综合的功率明显少于当前的GPU增长趋势。这项工作是将射线追踪作为渲染算法的目标。 Ray Tracing在支持现实的渲染方面具有高质量的复合全球照明效果，具有良好的优势。尽管利用与当前商业GPU所提供的不同类型的并行性，但它也非常适合并行处理。射线追踪也可以自然节流以调整给定实时时间或能量限制的图像质量。对于当前商业GPU使用的基于Z-Buffer的渲染技术，这要困难得多。从具有重量多重指令，多数据（MIMD）线程处理器开始的经过验证的框架开始，这些处理器与未在单个指令，多数据（SIMD）捆绑中有效执行的计算表现良好具有各种照明效果；通过射线节流和硬件辅助的无框施用技术来交易图像质量，能量和渲染速度的技术；记忆系统增强功能以​​减少数据移动和相关的能源成本；我们最近在射线追踪算法的许多部分中重新配置数据流和运行时管道重新配置的新工作的新型扩展；利用我们自定义体系结构的算法改进。如果成功的话，这项工作有可能从根本上改变计算机图形技术的方式。提高图像质量和降低能源成本的希望可能会改变我们在未来计算设备上体验图形的方式。