Point Containment Queries on Ray Tracing Cores for AMR Flow Visualization

Stefan Zellmann, Daniel Seifried, Nate Morrical, Ingo Wald, Will Usher, Jamie A. P. Law-Smith, Stefanie Walch-Gassner, André Hinkenjann

Abstract: Modern GPUs come with dedicated hardware to perform ray/triangle intersections and bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) traversal. While the primary use case for this hardware is photorealistic 3D computer graphics, with careful algorithm design scientists can also use this special-purpose hardware to accelerate general-purpose computations such as point containment queries. This article explains the principles behind these techniques and their application to vector field visualization of large simulation data using particle tracing.