Steven G. Parker, PhD | home | research | publications | images | software | vita | personal | links |
software
SCIRun

SCIRun is a scientific programming environment which provides for the interactive construction, debugging and steering of large scale computer simulations. A visual programming interface allows scientific computations to be composed, executed, controlled, and tuned via a visual programming interface. Users may extend the set of scientific computations provided. In order to make the dataflow paradigm applicable to large simulations, we have identified ways to avoid excessive memory use. Most importantly, we have applied SCIRun to large-scale problems in computational medicine, computational fluid mechanics, geophyics and computational chemistry.



rtrt

Interactive rendering systems provide a powerful way to convey information, especially for complex environments. Until recently the only interactive rendering algorithms were hardware-accelerated polygonal renderers. This approach has limitations due to both the algorithms used and the tight coupling to the hardware. Software-only implementations are more easily modified and extended which enables experimentation with various rendering and interaction options.

The real-time ray tracer (rtrt) is an interactive ray tracing system designed for current multiprocessor machines. This system was initially developed to examine ray tracing's performance on a modern architecture. We were surprised at just how responsive the resulting system turned out to be. Although the system takes careful advantage of system resources, it is essentially a brute force implementation. We intentionally take the simple path at each step believing that neither simplifying assumptions nor complex algorithms are needed for performance.

The ray tracing system is interactive in part because it runs on a high-end machine (SGI Origin 2000) with fast frame buffer, CPU set, and interconnect.



| University of Utah | School of Computing | Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute |