Astray: A Performance-Portable Geodesic Ray Tracer
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Date
2022
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association
Abstract
Geodesic ray tracing is the numerical method to compute the motion of matter and radiation in spacetime. It enables visualization of the geometry of spacetime and is an important tool to study the gravitational fields in the presence of astrophysical phenomena such as black holes. Although the method is largely established, solving the geodesic equation remains a computationally demanding task. In this work, we present Astray; a high-performance geodesic ray tracing library capable of running on a single or a cluster of computers equipped with compute or graphics processing units. The library is able to visualize any spacetime given its metric tensor and contains optimized implementations of a wide range of spacetimes, including commonly studied ones such as Schwarzschild and Kerr. The performance of the library is evaluated on standard consumer hardware as well as a compute cluster through strong and weak scaling benchmarks. The results indicate that the system is capable of reaching interactive frame rates with increasing use of high-performance computing resources. We further introduce a user interface capable of remote rendering on a cluster for interactive visualization of spacetimes.
Description
CCS Concepts: Applied computing --> Physics; Computing methodologies --> Ray tracing; Parallel algorithms; Human-centered computing --> Scientific visualization
@inproceedings{10.2312:vmv.20221208,
booktitle = {Vision, Modeling, and Visualization},
editor = {Bender, Jan and Botsch, Mario and Keim, Daniel A.},
title = {{Astray: A Performance-Portable Geodesic Ray Tracer}},
author = {Demiralp, Ali Can and Krüger, Marcel and Chao, Chu and Kuhlen, Torsten W. and Gerrits, Tim},
year = {2022},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISBN = {978-3-03868-189-2},
DOI = {10.2312/vmv.20221208}
}