Advanced PC Scene Generation Techniques & Hardware Architectures

Commercially available computer and graphics subsystems are achieving performance levels that suggest their applicability to real-time engineering test applications, specifically real-time scene generation. Entry level PC-based scene generation systems have been demonstrated for very basic environments and applications already. Complex multi and hyperspectral scene generation applications of the near future require computational and graphics throughout requiring a high degree of parallelization and communication bandwidth not readily available on current systems. Radiance Technologies proposes to evaluate the feasibility of leveraging current state-of-the-art parallel graphics systems to develop a scene generation architecture with a high-speed point-to-point and broadcast communications and novel real-time image compositing to support highly parallel image construction. Our Phase I effort will evaluate the use of emerging high speed busless communication protocols and post processing of multiple GPU floating point outputs in a flexible manner to support the modeling and scene generation for high dynamic range scenes and non-intensity based scene information such as that required for Ladar scene generation systems. We will evaluate the efficacy of applying one or more graphics processing units per CPU for the scene generation application as well.