Raytrace analysis

by
Abhishek Ranjan and Anupam Chakravorty and Vamshi Krishna Kadaru

Advised by
Rajeev Balasubramonian

Raytracing is a graphics application that renders a 2D image by detecting objects that intersect with numerous rays of light. In the near future, we may have enough transistors on a chip so that real-time hardware raytracing may be a possibility. This project seeks to provide data that may assist in defining such a hardware architecture. We aim to come up with data identifying the effect of various parameters like cache size, data set size, number of processors, interconnect latency, etc. on the performance of such an architecture. Subsequently, we will be re-designing the application and the simulator to come up with experiments that are more meaningful for a billion-transistor single-chip. One example would be investigating the effect of many computational units, backed by a single high-bandwidth data cache.