Following the success of GPU Gems: Programming Techniques, Tips, and Tricks for Real-Time Graphics NVIDIA have decided to produce a second GPU Gems volume in order to showcase the best new ideas and techniques for the latest programmable GPUs. Tentatively titled GPU Gems II: Techniques for Graphics and Compute Intensive Programming, this book will be edited by Matt Pharr, software engineer at NVIDIA.

NVIDIA are looking for ideas from developers who are using GPUs in new ways to create stunning graphics and cutting-edge applications. Chapters should present techniques and ideas that are broadly useful to GPU programmers and can be integrated into their applications. GPU Gems II will have an increased focus on chapters exploring non-graphics applications of the computational capabilities of GPU hardware.

To participate, read the submission guidelines and send an e-mail to articlesubmissions@nvidia.com with your proposed chapter title as the subject line, and the required description in the e-mail body. The deadline for submissions is Monday, August 16, 2004.

At its World-Wide Developers Conference Apple introduced Core Image as a feature of its upcoming Tiger release. Core Image is a framework for image processing on the GPU using a modified stream processing paradigm. Core Image is an interesting computational framework for offloading some general-purpose computations on to the GPU. It appears to be the first commercial effort to offer a general image computing environment for GPUs. The library comes with 100 basic plugins, called “Image Units”, and can be extended by developers. The computing model is based on stream processing, where each kernel is expressed in a high-level language and computes a result image based on some number of input images. The kernels can be strung together in arbitrary image computation “graphs”, in a model similar to that described by Michael Shantzis in his 1994 paper A Model for Efficient and Flexible Image Computing. Registered Apple Developers (free registration) can access a pre-release version of Core Image.

Jahshaka is an open-source, real-time editing, effects and image processing application that works in 3D space. The 1.9a8 release of jahshaka, available today, is supports GPU-accelerated image processing. The Jahshaka developers’ research in real-time image processing using the GPU is described in a white paper.

This paper presents an extensible system for interactively rendering multiple types of ray-casted objects in a manner compatible with pre-existing rendering engines. The sample implementation includes support for general quadrics and volumetric isosurfaces. It also includes a high-speed sphere renderer, and of course a standard triangle-rendering pipeline. The system is designed so that most of the algorithms designed to run on the existing raster engine can be added with minimal overhead/coding effort. We have demonstrated shadowing using the shadow-map algorithm. (“Beyond Triangles: A Simple Framework For Hardware-Accelerated Non-Triangular Primitives”, To be Submitted for publication.)

These works from the Database Systems Lab at UC Santa Barbara describe how a graphics processor can be effectively used to accelerate the performance of spatial database (GIS databases) operations. Spatial database operations, especially which involve polygon datasets, have been known to be computationally expensive. Sun et al. describe a novel hardware / software co-processing technique which uses basic features of a GPU to reduce the spatial query processing cost. Experimental evaluation shows that their hardware-based approach can significantly outperform leading software-based techniques. (Hardware Acceleration for Spatial Selections and Joins Chengyu Sun, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi. Proceedings of SIGMOD 2003.) However, this evaluation is done in a stand-alone setting where there are no indices, preprocessing or other optimizations available in a database. Bandi et al. extend Sun et al.’s work and integrate the hardware-based technique into a popular commercial database. Rigorous experimentation over real-life data sets shows that the hardware-based approach is very effective and can be complimentary to the optimizations available in a commercial database setting. (Hardware Acceleration in Commercial Databases: A Case Study of Spatial Operations Nagender Bandi, Chengyu Sun, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi to appear in VLDB 2004.)

Modern GPUs perform floating point math and read data from off-chip memory at rates roughly five times that of a fast Pentium 4 CPU. However, the performance of algorithms for computing dense matrix-matrix products on GPUs has lagged behind that of good CPU implementations. In this paper, we show why this result is not an artifact of poorly designed algorithms, and explain how present-day graphics architectures are highly inefficient for computations such as matrix-matrix multiplication that involve significant data reuse. (Understanding the Efficiency of GPU Algorithms for Matrix-Matrix Multiplication. Kayvon Fatahalian, Jeremy Sugerman, and Pat Hanrahan.)

Inspired by the summer Olympics taking place this year, ShaderTech.com is hosting a shader contest this summer with three categories: Materials & Environmental Effects, Image Processing & NPR Effects, and Thinking Outside the Box (this category includes GPGPU applications!).

With over $20,000 worth of prizes available, the Shader Triathlon is a great way to show off your shader skills. Participants can win gold, silver, and bronze prizes for each category, as well as the grand prize: 3ds max, RT/Shader, and a GDC 2005 Gigapass! In addition, all entrants will be entered into a random drawing for the following prizes: 3ds max, RT/Shader, and GPU Gems books.

The Shader Triathlon is sponsored by NVIDIA, discreet, RTzen, and the Game Developers Conference 2005. (ShaderTech.com Shader Triathlon)

ATI’s Ashli version 1.4.0 has been released and is available for download from: Ashli Home. Ashli is a toolkit intended to assist developers exploring programmable shading on GPUs. It supports a reasonable subset of OpenGL (GLSL), Microsoft’s DirectX (HLSL) and RenderMan shading languages. Ashli’s significant contribution is in hardware resource virtualization, segmenting a complex shader program into GPU realizable streams. The posted Ashli viewer application demonstrates the use of shader partitions in a multi-pass rendering context. Ashli outputs both metadata and code, orthogonal to any of the languages supported. Targets include OpenGL ARB_vertex_program and ARB_fragment_program, and DirectX 9.0 Vertex Shader and Pixel Shader versions 2.0 and 2.X API’s. Optionally, Ashli emits a unified Microsoft FX file format, embedding progressive techniques of state and code sections. (Ashli 1.4.0)

3Dlabs Inc. has introduced its PCI Express-based Wildcat Realizm 800. A professional PCI Express-based graphics accelerator, the Wildcat Realizm 800 features a Wildcat Realizm Vertex/Scalability Unit (VSU) and dual Wildcat Realizm Visual Processing Units (VPU). The Wildcat Realizm 800 and the new AGP 8x-based Wildcat Realizm 100 and 200 deliver programmability via the OpenGL Shading Language and Microsoft DirectX 9.0 HLSL shader programs. The Wildcat Realizm 800 is slated for availability in the third calendar quarter of this year at a suggested retail price of $2799. (3Dlabs Wildcat Realizm Family)

Established by NVIDIA Corporation, NVIDIA U is a conference developed to promote the advancement of graphics technology through industry and academic collaboration. NVIDIA U 2004 will be a highly focused, one day event. Conveniently held in Los Angeles one day before GP2 and two days prior to Siggraph 2004, it is sure to sizzle with presentations targeting current and future NVIDIA technology. NVIDIA U is an NDA only conference that provides the ideal forum for leaders in the graphics world to collaborate and share ideas and research in graphics technology. (NVIDIA U Information Page)