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Packet Ray Tracing with the ARM NEON Architecture

Waldemarson, Gustaf LU (2014) EDA920 20141
Department of Computer Science
Abstract
The ray tracing algorithm has long been used to create near photorealistic images and even simple ray tracers can simulate effects such as shadows, reflections and refractions where other methods struggle. Today, the state-of-the-art CPU ray tracers are typically those that are able to efficiently leverage datalevel parallelism at the instruction level by using SIMD extensions to allow the processor to trace multiple rays simultaneously, rather than one at a time.
Within the ARM processor, the SIMD architecture is known as NEON and
it is used to speed up data-parallel applications such as multimedia decoding and computer graphics. Thus, in this thesis we have investigated the implementation and performance of a ray tracer that utilizes... (More)
The ray tracing algorithm has long been used to create near photorealistic images and even simple ray tracers can simulate effects such as shadows, reflections and refractions where other methods struggle. Today, the state-of-the-art CPU ray tracers are typically those that are able to efficiently leverage datalevel parallelism at the instruction level by using SIMD extensions to allow the processor to trace multiple rays simultaneously, rather than one at a time.
Within the ARM processor, the SIMD architecture is known as NEON and
it is used to speed up data-parallel applications such as multimedia decoding and computer graphics. Thus, in this thesis we have investigated the implementation and performance of a ray tracer that utilizes the NEON architecture to trace packets of rays similar to modern ray tracing frameworks. To determine the efficiency of it we also developed a single-ray tracer as a reference and compared them in regard to both runtime and power consumption. In the end, we found that the optimized ray tracer scales better and performs around 150 – 300% better than the reference single-ray tracer. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
author
Waldemarson, Gustaf LU
supervisor
organization
course
EDA920 20141
year
type
H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
subject
keywords
Packet Ray Tracing, ARM, NEON, SIMD
ISSN
1650-2884
language
English
id
4730664
date added to LUP
2014-10-27 14:40:37
date last changed
2014-10-27 14:40:37
@misc{4730664,
  abstract     = {{The ray tracing algorithm has long been used to create near photorealistic images and even simple ray tracers can simulate effects such as shadows, reflections and refractions where other methods struggle. Today, the state-of-the-art CPU ray tracers are typically those that are able to efficiently leverage datalevel parallelism at the instruction level by using SIMD extensions to allow the processor to trace multiple rays simultaneously, rather than one at a time.
Within the ARM processor, the SIMD architecture is known as NEON and
it is used to speed up data-parallel applications such as multimedia decoding and computer graphics. Thus, in this thesis we have investigated the implementation and performance of a ray tracer that utilizes the NEON architecture to trace packets of rays similar to modern ray tracing frameworks. To determine the efficiency of it we also developed a single-ray tracer as a reference and compared them in regard to both runtime and power consumption. In the end, we found that the optimized ray tracer scales better and performs around 150 – 300% better than the reference single-ray tracer.}},
  author       = {{Waldemarson, Gustaf}},
  issn         = {{1650-2884}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Student Paper}},
  title        = {{Packet Ray Tracing with the ARM NEON Architecture}},
  year         = {{2014}},
}