Graphics Hardware 2002

PROGRAM & PRESENTATIONS

Sunday, September 1, 2002

08:30	Registration
09:15	Welcome and Opening Chair: A. Lastra
09:30	Keynote: Programmable Graphics Hardware: Beyond Real-Time Movie Rendering William R. Mark, NVIDIA Chair: W. Heidrich
	The latest generation of 3D PC graphics hardware (GPUs) includes highly-programmable floating-point vertex and pixel-fragment processors. These processors are flexible enough to support high-level C-like programming languages. GPU designers have added programmability to these GPUs mostly to support procedural shading capabilities similar to those used in off-line movie rendering. But, much of the impact of these GPUs may come from the fact that they are the first highly parallel processors that are deployed on every desktop and are user programmable. The stream-processing programming model used by these GPUs can be used to efficiently support a wide variety of algorithms, including ray tracing and various types of physical simulation. Even when GPUs are used for their primary purpose -- procedural shading and transformation of rasterized geometry -- the shader programs will often be quite different from those used in off-line rendering. Real time applications are different because they allow users to interact with the scene, and are deployed widely enough that developers are willing to heavily tune their performance. This talk will summarize recent developments in graphics hardware and programming environments, and then focus on the opportunities and challenges that these developments present. Biography: William R. Mark is the lead architect at NVIDIA of the Cg Language. Prior to that, he worked as a Research Associate at Stanford University, where he co-lead the Stanford Real-Time Shading Project with Pat Hanrahan. Starting in January 2003, Bill will join the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science. His research interests focus on systems and hardware architectures for real-time computer graphics. Dr. Mark received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1999.
10:30	Coffe Break
11:00	Session 1: Texture Mapping Chair: M. Meißner
	"Adaptive Texture Maps" Martin Kraus, Thomas Ertl, University of Stuttgart pdf [8.5 MB] ppt [1.3 MB]
	"Resample Hardware for 3D Graphics" Koen Meinds, Bart Barenbrug, Philips Research pdf [0.9 MB]
12:00	Lunch
13:30	Session 2: Ray Tracing vs. Scan Conversion Chair: H. Moreton
	"SaarCOR - A Hardware Architecture for Ray Tracing" Jörg Schmittler, Ingo Wald, Philipp Slusallek, Saarland University pdf [3.4 MB]
	"The Ray Engine" Nathan A. Carr, Jesse D. Hall, John C. Hart, University of Illinois
	"Comparing Reyes and OpenGL on a Stream Architecture" John D. Owens, Brucek Khailany, Brian Towles, William J. Dally, Stanford University pdf [0.7 MB]
15:00	Coffee Break
15:30	Session 3: Hot3D Chair: T. Ertl
	"Ray Casting in VolumePro 1000" Y. Wu, V. Bhatia, H. Lauer, L. Seiler, Terarecon ppt [0.8 MB]
	"GeForce4" J.Montrym, H. Moreton, NVIDIA pdf [1.1 MB]
	"Radeon 9700" G. Elder, ATI ppt [6.5 MB]
17:00	Get ready for banquet
17:15	Buses for banquet are directly leaving from the conference site
23:15	Approximate return time from banquet

Monday, September 2, 2002

09:00	Keynote: Hard Software, Soft Hardware - is there a right way to design visualization systems? Wolfgang Straßer and Günther Knittel, University of Tübingen Chair: M. Doggett
	For visualization systems, in particular volume rendering systems, four competing design paradigms are followed: using commercial 3D graphics hardware and optimized low-level programming, designing special-purpose chips, using configurable chips such as FPGAs, or implementing (optimized) software systems on general-purpose CPUs as well as DSPs. Adding the parallel versions of each variant gives a broad spectrum of viable approaches. However, none of them has been successfully established as accepted standard. This is because application requirements differ widely, and each method has its distinct disadvantages. Also, in the absence of strong market demands, an inexpensive chip solution dedicated to visualization applications has not been made available yet. This leaves scientists, customers and vendors in this area with the difficult question of how to define a general purchasing or product development strategy. At WSI/GRIS we have broad expertise in at least three of the aforementioned design principles. In this talk we will give an overview about our research activities, and how we tried to deal with the strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches. A clear winner might not be on the horizon, however. Therefore, we will discuss future projects which might remove some of the disadvantages of current approaches. Biographies: Dr. Knittel received a Master Degree (Diplom) in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Tuebingen, Germany. He spent four years as researcher at HP Labs, Palo Alto, CA. He returned to the University of Tuebingen to work in a research project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG. Throughout his career, Dr. Knittel has been working on hardware architectures for parallel processing and computer graphics. He is a member of IEEE CS and Eurographics. Wolfgang Strasser received a Master Degree (Dipl.-Ing.) in Communications and Computer Science in 1969 and a PhD in 1974 in Computer Science from TU Berlin. In 1978 he was appointed Professor of Computer Science at the Technical University Darmstadt. In 1986 he moved to University of Tuebingen and founded the graphics research group. At present, Strasser is Professor of Computer Science and adjunct Professor of Mathematics at Tuebingen. The graphics group in Tuebingen consists of about 25 researchers working in the area of Graphics Systems Design, Graphics Hardware, Visualization, physical based modelling,Rendering and Geometric Modeling. The Lab is supported by grants from the German Science foundation, CEC and industry. In 1986, Strasser started the successful series of EG/Siggraph graphics hardware workshops.He has published numerous paper in scientific journals and conferences. He has given tutorials at EG conferences, Siggraph, has chaired many conferences and workshops, and is a fellow of the EG Association.Strasser is a consultant to the government and industry. In 2000, the Technical University of Darmstadt awarded Professor Strasser with a honorary doctor degree for his outstanding contributions to the field of Computer Graphics.
10:00	Coffee Break
10:30	Session 4: Shading and Shaders Chair: P. Lalonde
	"Shader Metaprogramming" Michael D. McCool, Zheng Qin, Tiberiu S. Popa, University of Waterloo pdf [1 MB] ppt [0.5 MB] revised paper [0.5 MB]
	"Efficient Partitioning of Fragment Shaders for Multipass Rendering on Programmable Graphics Hardware" Eric Chan, Ren Ng, Pradeep Sen, Kekoa Proudfoot, Pat Hanrahan, Stanford University pdf [1 MB]
	"Efficient Rendering of Spatial Bi-directional Reflectance Distribution Functions" David K. McAllister, Anselmo A. Lastra, University of North Carolina, Wolfgang Heidrich, University of British Columbia
12:00	Lunch
13:30	Session 5: Rendering and Simulation Chair: J. Kautz
	"Low Latency Photon Mapping Using Block Hashing" Vincent C. H. Ma, Michael D. McCool, University of Waterloo pdf [3.1 MB] ppt [0.8 MB]
	"Interactive Rendering of Atmospheric Scattering Effects Using Graphics Hardware" Yoshinori Dobashi, Tsuyoshi Yamamoto, Hokkaido University, Tomoyuki Nishita, The University of Tokyo pdf [0.9 MB] ppt [7.0 MB]
	"Physically-Based Visual Simulation on Graphics Hardware" Mark J. Harris, Greg Coombe, Thorsten Scheuermann, Anselmo Lastra, University of North Carolina
15:00	Coffee Break
15:30	Session 6: Volume Rendering Chair: H. Lauer
	"High-Quality Unstructured Volume Rendering on the PC Platform" Stefan Guthe, University of Tübingen, Stefan Röttger, Andreas Schieber, University of Stuttgart, Wolfgang Straßer, University of Tübingen, Thomas Ertl, University of Stuttgart pdf [7.7 MB] ppt [5.3 MB]
	"Dependency Graph Scheduling in a Volumetric Ray Tracing Architecture" Susan Frank, Arie Kaufman, State University of New York pdf [0.9 MB] ppt [0.5 MB]
	"A Reconfigurable Interactive Volume Rendering System" Michael Meißner, Viatronix, Urs Kanus, Gregor Wetekam, Johannes Hirche, Alexander Ehlert, Wolfgang Straßer, University of Tübingen, Michael Doggett, ATI, Roland Proksa, Philips Research ppt [2.3 MB]
17:00	Best Paper and Closing Remarks Chair: B. Schneider The best paper award went to E.Chan et al. for Multipass Rendering on Programmable Graphics Hardware"