Get Your Graphics On:
OpenGL Advances with the Times
OpenGL, the decade-old mother of all graphics application programming interfaces (APIs), is getting two significant updates to bring it into the 21st century.
A Conversation with Kurt Akeley and Pat Hanrahan
Interviewing either Kurt Akeley or Pat Hanrahan for this month's special report on GPUs would have been a great opportunity, so needless to say we were delighted when both of these graphics-programming veterans agreed to participate.
GPUs: A Closer Look
A gamer wanders through a virtual world rendered in near- cinematic detail. Seconds later, the screen fills with a 3D explosion, the result of unseen enemies hiding in physically accurate shadows. Disappointed, the user exits the game and returns to a computer desktop that exhibits the stylish 3D look-and-feel of a modern window manager. Both of these visual experiences require hundreds of gigaflops of computing performance, a demand met by the GPU (graphics processing unit) present in every consumer PC.
Data-Parallel Computing
Users always care about performance. Although often it's just a matter of making sure the software is doing only what it should, there are many cases where it is vital to get down to the metal and leverage the fundamental characteristics of the processor.
Scalable Parallel Programming with CUDA
The advent of multicore CPUs and manycore GPUs means that mainstream processor chips are now parallel systems. Furthermore, their parallelism continues to scale with Moore's law. The challenge is to develop mainstream application software that transparently scales its parallelism to leverage the increasing number of processor cores, much as 3D graphics applications transparently scale their parallelism to manycore GPUs with widely varying numbers of cores.
Future Graphics Architectures
Graphics architectures are in the midst of a major transition. In the past, these were specialized architectures designed to support a single rendering algorithm: the standard Z buffer. Realtime 3D graphics has now advanced to the point where the Z-buffer algorithm has serious shortcomings for generating the next generation of higher-quality visual effects demanded by games and other interactive 3D applications. There is also a desire to use the high computational capability of graphics architectures to support collision detection, approximate physics simulations, scene management, and simple artificial intelligence.
A Conversation with Jeff Heer, Martin Wattenberg, and Fernanda Viégas
Sharing visualization with the world
A Tour through the Visualization Zoo
A survey of powerful visualization techniques, from the obvious to the obscure
Visualizing System Latency
Heat maps are a unique and powerful way to visualize latency data. Explaining the results, however, is an ongoing challenge.
by Brendan Gregg | May 28, 2010
This article appears in print in Communications of the ACM, Volume 53 Issue 7—
Software Development with Code Maps
Could those ubiquitous hand-drawn code diagrams become a thing of the past?
by Robert DeLine, Gina Venolia, Kael Rowan | July 4, 2010
This article appears in print in Communications of the ACM, Volume 53 Issue 8—
Photoshop Scalability:
Keeping It Simple
Clem Cole and Russell Williams discuss Photoshop's long history with parallelism, and what they now see as the main challenge.
A Conversation with Ed Catmull
The head of Pixar Animation Studios talks tech with Stanford professor Pat Hanrahan.
Interactive Dynamics for Visual Analysis
A taxonomy of tools that support the fluent and flexible use of visualizations
by Jeffrey Heer, Ben Shneiderman | February 20, 2012
This article appears in print in Communications of the ACM, Volume 55 Issue 4—
Modeling People and Places with Internet Photo Collections
Understanding the world from the sea of online photos
by David Crandall, Noah Snavely | May 11, 2012
This article appears in print in Communications of the ACM, Volume 55 Issue 6—
