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The unpreconditioned H‐TFETI‐DP (hybrid total finite element tearing and interconnecting dual‐primal) domain decomposition method introduced by Klawonn and Rheinbach turned out to be an effective solver for variational inequalities discretized by huge structured grids. The basic idea is to decompose the domain into non‐overlapping subdomains, interconnect some adjacent subdomains into clusters on a primal level, and enforce the continuity of the solution across both the subdomain and cluster interfaces by Lagrange multipliers. After eliminating the primal variables, we get a reasonably conditioned quadratic programming (QP) problem with bound and equality constraints. Here, we first reduce the continuous problem to the subdomains' boundaries, then discretize it using the boundary element method, and finally interconnect the subdomains by the averages of adjacent edges. The resulting QP problem in multipliers with a small coarse grid is solved by specialized QP algorithms with optimal complexity. The method can be considered as a three‐level multigrid with the coarse grids split between primal and dual variables. Numerical experiments illustrate the efficiency of the presented H‐TBETI‐DP (hybrid total boundary element tearing and interconnecting dual‐primal) method and nice spectral properties of the discretized Steklov–Poincaré operators as compared with their finite element counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Terrain analysis plays an important role in computer graphics, hydrology and geomorphology. In particular, analyzing the path of material flow over a terrain with consideration of local depressions is a precursor to many further tasks in erosion, river formation, and plant ecosystem simulation. For example, fluvial erosion simulation used in terrain modeling computes water discharge to repeatedly locate erosion channels for soil removal and transport. Despite its significance, traditional methods face performance constraints, limiting their broader applicability. In this paper, we propose a novel GPU flow routing algorithm that computes the water discharge in 풪(log n) iterations for a terrain with n vertices (assuming n processors). We also provide a depression routing algorithm to route the water out of local minima formed by depressions in the terrain, which converges in 풪(log2 n) iterations. Our implementation of these algorithms leads to a 5× speedup for flow routing and 34 × to 52 × speedup for depression routing compared to previous work on a 10242 terrain, enabling interactive control of terrain simulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present edge‐friend, a data structure for quad meshes with access to neighborhood information required for Catmull‐Clark subdivision surface refinement. Edge‐friend enables efficient real‐time subdivision surface rendering. In particular, the resulting algorithm is deterministic, does not require hardware support for atomic floating‐point arithmetic, and is optimized for efficient rendering on GPUs. Edge‐friend exploits that after one subdivision step, two edges can be uniquely and implicitly assigned to each quad. Additionally, edge‐friend is a compact data structure, adding little overhead. Our algorithm is simple to implement in a single compute shader kernel, and requires minimal synchronization which makes it particularly suited for asynchronous execution. We easily extend our kernel to support relevant Catmull‐Clark subdivision surface features, including semi‐smooth creases, boundaries, animation and attribute interpolation. In case of topology changes, our data structure requires little preprocessing, making it amendable for a variety of applications, including real‐time editing and animations. Our method can process and render billions of triangles per second on modern GPUs. For a sample mesh, our algorithm generates and renders 2.9 million triangles in 0.58ms on an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Volume data these days is usually massive in terms of its topology, multiple fields, or temporal component. With the gap between compute and memory performance widening, the memory subsystem becomes the primary bottleneck for scientific volume visualization. Simple, structured, regular representations are often infeasible because the buses and interconnects involved need to accommodate the data required for interactive rendering. In this state‐of‐the‐art report, we review works focusing on large‐scale volume rendering beyond those typical structured and regular grid representations. We focus primarily on hierarchical and adaptive mesh refinement representations, unstructured meshes, and compressed representations that gained recent popularity. We review works that approach this kind of data using strategies such as out‐of‐core rendering, massive parallelism, and other strategies to cope with the sheer size of the ever‐increasing volume of data produced by today's supercomputers and acquisition devices. We emphasize the data management side of large‐scale volume rendering systems and also include a review of tools that support the various volume data types discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The humble loop shrinking property played a central role in the inception of modern topology but it has been eclipsed by more abstract algebraic formalisms. This is particularly true in the context of detecting relevant non‐contractible loops on surfaces where elaborate homological and/or graph theoretical constructs are favored in algorithmic solutions. In this work, we devise a variational analogy to the loop shrinking property and show that it yields a simple, intuitive, yet powerful solution allowing a streamlined treatment of the problem of handle and tunnel loop detection. Our formalization tracks the evolution of a diffusion front randomly initiated on a single location on the surface. Capitalizing on a diffuse interface representation combined with a set of rules for concurrent front interactions, we develop a dynamic data structure for tracking the evolution on the surface encoded as a sparse matrix which serves for performing both diffusion numerics and loop detection and acts as the workhorse of our fully parallel implementation. The substantiated results suggest our approach outperforms state of the art and robustly copes with highly detailed geometric models. As a byproduct, our approach can be used to construct Reeb graphs by diffusion thus avoiding commonly encountered issues when using Morse functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ray tracing is an inherent part of photorealistic image synthesis algorithms. The problem of ray tracing is to find the nearest intersection with a given ray and scene. Although this geometric operation is relatively simple, in practice, we have to evaluate billions of such operations as the scene consists of millions of primitives, and the image synthesis algorithms require a high number of samples to provide a plausible result. Thus, scene primitives are commonly arranged in spatial data structures to accelerate the search. In the last two decades, the bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) has become the de facto standard acceleration data structure for ray tracing‐based rendering algorithms in offline and recently also in real‐time applications. In this report, we review the basic principles of bounding volume hierarchies as well as advanced state of the art methods with a focus on the construction and traversal. Furthermore, we discuss industrial frameworks, specialized hardware architectures, other applications of bounding volume hierarchies, best practices, and related open problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subdivision surfaces have become an invaluable asset in production environments. While progress over the last years has allowed the use of graphics hardware to meet performance demands during animation and rendering, high‐performance is limited to immutable mesh connectivity scenarios. Motivated by recent progress in mesh data structures, we show how the complete Catmull‐Clark subdivision scheme can be abstracted in the language of linear algebra. While this high‐level formulation allows for a fully parallel implementation with significant performance gains, the underlying algebraic operations require further specialization for modern parallel hardware. Integrating domain knowledge about the mesh matrix data structure, we replace costly general linear algebra operations like matrix‐matrix multiplication by specialized kernels. By further considering innate properties of Catmull‐Clark subdivision, like the quad‐only structure after refinement, we achieve an additional order of magnitude in performance and significantly reduce memory footprints. Our approach can be adapted seamlessly for different use cases, such as regular subdivision of dynamic meshes, fast evaluation for immutable topology and feature‐adaptive subdivision for efficient rendering of animated models. In this way, patchwork solutions are avoided in favor of a streamlined solution with consistent performance gains throughout the production pipeline. The versatility of the sparse matrix linear algebra abstraction underlying our work is further demonstrated by extension to other schemes such as and Loop subdivision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a scalable solution to render complex scenes from a large amount of viewpoints. While previous approaches rely either on a scene or a view hierarchy to process multiple elements together, we make full use of both, enabling sublinear performance in terms of views and scene complexity. By concurrently traversing the hierarchies, we efficiently find shared information among views to amortize rendering costs. One example application is many‐light global illumination. Our solution accelerates shadow map generation for virtual point lights, whose number can now be raised to over a million while maintaining interactive rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a matrix assembly technique for arbitrary polynomial order finite element simulations on simplex meshes for graphics processing units (GPU). Compared to the current state of the art in GPU‐based matrix assembly, we avoid the need for an intermediate sparse matrix and perform assembly directly into the final, GPU‐optimized data structure. Thereby, we avoid the resulting 180% to 600% memory overhead, depending on polynomial order, and associated allocation time, while simplifying the assembly code and using a more compact mesh representation. We compare our method with existing algorithms and demonstrate significant speedups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]