Watt / Coumans / ElKoura Multithreading for Visual Effects

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4822-4357-4
Verlag: Taylor & Francis
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 255 Seiten

Tackle the Challenges of Parallel Programming in the Visual Effects Industry

In Multithreading for Visual Effects, developers from DreamWorks Animation, Pixar, Side Effects, Intel, and AMD share their successes and failures in the messy real-world application area of production software. They provide practical advice on multithreading techniques and visual effects used in popular visual effects libraries (such as Bullet, OpenVDB, and OpenSubdiv), one of the industry’s leading visual effects packages (Houdini), and proprietary animation systems. This information is valuable not just to those in the visual effects arena, but also to developers of high performance software looking to increase performance of their code.

Diverse Solutions to Solve Performance Problems

After an introductory chapter, each subsequent chapter presents a case study that illustrates how the authors used multithreading techniques to achieve better performance. The authors discuss the problems that occurred and explain how they solved them. The case studies encompass solutions for shaving milliseconds, solutions for optimizing longer running tasks, multithreading techniques for modern CPU architectures, and massive parallelism using GPUs. Some of the case studies include open source projects so you can try out these techniques for yourself and see how well they work.

Zielgruppe

Visual effects technicians, software engineers in the visual effects industry, and game engine developers; students in graphics processing or parallel computing courses.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Watt, Martin

Coumans, Erwin

ElKoura, George

Henderson, Ronald

Kraemer, Manuel

Lait, Jeff

Reinders, James

Fachgebiete

• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik Programmierung | Softwareentwicklung Spiele-Programmierung, Rendering, Animation
• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik Professionelle Anwendung

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction and Overview James Reinders
Introduction

Overview of Case Studies

Motivation
Program in Tasks, Not Threads

Value of Abstraction

Scaling and Vectorization

Advancing Programming Languages for Parallel Programming

Parallel Programming in C and C++

Data Movement and Layout

Summary

Additional Reading

Houdini: Multithreading Existing Software Jeff Lait
What Is Houdini?

Rewrite or Refactor

Patterns

Copy on Write

Dependencies

OpenCL

The Presto Execution System: Designing for Multithreading George ElKoura
Introduction

Presto

Presto's Execution System
User Extensions
Memory Access Patterns

Flexibility to Experiment

Multithreading Strategies

Background Execution

Other Multithreading Strategies

Debugging and Profiling Tools

Summary

LibEE: Parallel Evaluation of Character Rigs Martin Watt
Introduction

Motivation

Specific Requirements for Character Animation Graph

Threadsafety

Scalability: Software Considerations
Scalability: Hardware Considerations

Production Considerations

Threading Visualization Tool

Rig Optimization Case Studies

Overall Performance Results

Limits of Scalability

Summary

Fluids: Simulation on the CPU Ronald D. Henderson
Motivation

Programming Models
Fluid Simulation

Summary

Bullet Physics: Simulation with OpenCL Erwin Coumans
Introduction

Rewriting from Scratch Using OpenCL
GPU Spatial Acceleration Structures
GPU Contact Point Generation

GPU Constraint Solving

OpenSubdiv: Interoperating GPU Compute and Drawing Manuel Kraemer
Representing Shapes

The Control Cage

Uniform Subdivision

Serializing the Mesh Representation
Transition from Multicores to Many-Cores
Reducing Branching Divergence

Optimization Trade-Offs

Evaluating Our Progress

Fundamental Limitations of Uniform Subdivision
Feature Adaptive Subdivision

Implementing the GPU Rendering Engine

Texturing

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index