2015-07-09

Software-Defined & High-Fidelity Visualization

Dr. Johannes Guenther, Intel

Abstract

Supercomputers help to analyze huge data sets and to simulate complex theories in different science domains. Today, the results of these analyses and simulations are visualized using GPUs in workstations or small, dedicated visualization clusters. However, visualization on GPUs becomes harder and harder due to the ever increasing data size to transport and process. As an alternative we recommend software-defined visualization, i.e. using the CPUs of HPC-clusters also for visualization. One project of our group in this direction is OpenSWR, a fast software rasterizer implementing the OpenGL API, which can be used as a drop-in replacement for many visualization applications. Another project I like to present is OSPRay, a scalable and flexible, ray tracing based rendering library. In this talk I will show that software-defined visualization cannot only compete well with GPU-based visualization, but is often actually the better choice, because of the offered high-fidelity renderings.

Biography

After completing his studies in physics and computer science in 2003, Johannes Guenther has obtained his PhD from the MPI-I in Saarbrücken in 2008. Afterwards, he spent 6 years as an Senior Researcher and Software Architect at RTT AG in Munich before he joined Intel Munich as a Senior Software Graphics Engineer in the area of ray tracing in 2014. Johannes currently works in the field of software-defined visualization where he pushes the usage of CPUs where GPUs are traditionally employed. He participated in Intel's Embree project - a ray tracer used in many popular movies - and other projects.

Category: CE Seminar