UTCS Real-Time Graphics and Parallel Systems Group

Real-Time Graphics and Parallel Systems

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Overview

Our research group is pursuing a "vertically integrated" approach to real-time 3-D graphics systems research. Our work spans graphics algorithms, software systems, and hardware architectures, as well as the interaction between these system layers.

Research summary

We are exploring new system designs for real-time graphics that:

Allow the use of visibility algorithms that are better than the traditional Z-buffer.
Examples of this approach include our irregular Z buffer work, and various forms of raytracing that we are exploring.
Efficiently support the creation, modification, and traversal of adaptive data structures such as linked lists and kd-trees.
Efficiently support a wide variety of parallel algorithms.

Our architectural focus is on single-chip parallel architectures. Our graphics focus is on complex, real-time scenes containing moving and deformable objects. Almost all of our projects require innovations in both graphics algorithms and hardware architectures.

Longer-term goal

The needs of real-time 3-D graphics are likely to drive the future evolution of commodity parallel architectures. Fortunately, we anticipate that the architectural capabilities needed to support our real-time graphics goals will be sufficiently general that future graphics-oriented architectures will be useful for a broad variety of other parallelizable computations. Thus, we believe that we are in effect designing the commodity general-purpose parallel computer architecture of the future.

Group
Members:

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Faculty

Current
Graduate
Students

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Undergraduates

Former
Undergraduates

Don Fussell
Okan Arikan
Bill Mark
Sarah Abraham
Peter Djeu
Andrew Dreher
Sean Keely
Christian Miller
Chris Burns
Warren Hunt
Greg Johnson
Paul Navratil
Jenna Goddard
Ali Moghadam
Nic Morales
Gilbert Bernstein
Andrew Floren
Adrian Mayorga