Many scienti c applications that run on today s multiprocessors such as weather forecast ing and seismic analysis are bottlenecked by their le I O needs Even if the multiprocessor is con gured with su cient I O hardware the le system software often fails to provide the available bandwidth to the application Although libraries and enhanced le system interfaces can make a signi cant improvement w...

We present a new GPU pipeline for rendering per-pixel exact shadows that are cast by point lights and parallel lights. Our approach is hybrid in that it uses kD-tree accelerated ray-tracing to determine shadow-ray intersections, and rasterization to effectively reduce both the number of shadow rays to be traversed and the number of sub-spaces to be considered along each of these rays. To achiev...

Abstract. Terrain parameters like topographic horizon and sky view factor (SVF) are used in numerous fields applications. In atmospheric climate modelling, such utilised to parameterise the effect of terrain geometry on radiation exchanges between surface atmosphere. Ideally, these derived from a high-resolution digital elevation model (DEM) because inferring them coarser data induces smoothing...

A VLSI chip for ray tracing bicubic patches in Bezier form is explored. The purpose of the chip is to calculate the intersection point of a ray with the bicubic patch to a specified level of accuracy, returning the location of the intersection on the patch and on the ray. This is done by computing the intersection of the ray with a bounding volume of the patch and repeatedly subdividing the pat...

Is it possible to get a sensible answer from a computer without even running a program? Yes indeed, report Hosten et al. on page 949 of this issue— and they have the experimental proof. The thread that leads thus far has its origin in the early 1990s, with the introduction of a quantum paradox known as the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb thought-experiment. They showed that by sending a photon into a simp...