The NVIDIA® OptiX™ ray tracing engine is a programmable system designed for NVIDIA GPUs and other highly parallel architectures. The OptiX engine builds on the key observation that most ray tracing algorithms can be implemented using a small set of programmable operations. Consequently, the core of OptiX is a domain-specific just-in-time compiler that generates custom ray tracing kernels by combining user-supplied programs for ray generation, material shading, object intersection, and scene traversal. This enables the implementation of a highly diverse set of ray tracing-based algorithms and applications, including interactive rendering, offline rendering, collision detection systems, artificial intelligence queries, and scientific simulations such as sound propagation. OptiX achieves high performance through a compact object model and application of several ray tracing-specific compiler optimizations. For ease of use it exposes a single-ray programming model with full support for recursion and a dynamic dispatch mechanism similar to virtual function calls.

The Material Point Method is used for complex simulation of solid materials represented using many individual particles. Visualizing such data using existing polygonal or volumetric methods does not accurately encapsulate both the particle and macroscopic properties of the data. In this case study we present various methods used to visualize the particle data as spheres and explain and evaluate two methods of augmenting the visualization using silhouette edges and advanced illumination such as ambient occlusion.We also present informal feedback received from the application scientists who use these methods in their workflow.

Abstract Due to our familiarity with how fluids move and interact, as well as their complexity, plausible animation of fluidsremains a challenging problem. We present a particle interaction method for simulating fluids. The underlyingequations of fluid motion are discretized using moving particles and their interactions. The method allows simulationand modeling of mixing fluids with different physical properties, fluid interactions with stationary objects, andfluids that exhibit significant interface breakup and fragmentation. The gridless computational method is suitedfor medium scale problems since computational elements exist only where needed. The method fits well into thecurrent user interaction paradigm and allows easy user control over the desired fluid motion.