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While each new generation of processors gets larger caches and more compute power, external memory bandwidth capabilities increase at a much lower pace. Additionally, processors are equipped with wide vector units that require low instruction level divergence to be efficiently utilized. In order to exploit these trends in ray tracing, we present an alternative to traditional depth-first ray traver

We propose a generalized approach to decoupling shading from visibility sampling in graphics pipelines, which we call decoupled sampling. Decoupled sampling enables stochastic supersampling of motion and defocus blur at reduced shading cost, as well as controllable or adaptive shading rates which trade off shading quality for performance. It can be thought of as a generalization of multisample ant

In this paper, we present a new color buffer compression algorithm for floating-point buffers. It can operate in either an approximate (lossy) mode or in an exact (lossless) mode. The approximate mode is error-bounded and the amount of introduced accumulated error is controlled via a few parameters. The core of the algorithm lies in an efficient representation and color space transform, followed b

A fundamental part of many computer algorithms involves traversing a binary tree. One notable example is traversing a space-partitioning acceleration structure when computing ray-traced images. Traditionally, the traversal requires a stack to be temporarily stored for each ray, which results in both additional storage and memory-bandwidth usage. We present a novel algorithm for traversing a binary

Accessibility is an important factor in land-use planning and several methods have been developed to calculate and to predict it. Nevertheless, it is seldom applied in planning situations, maybe because many land-use planners and elected officials lack the knowledge and resources needed to use traffic models. Consequently, accessibility is often used as a concept and a goal in daily planning, but

This paper presents a new method, based on constraint programming, for modeling and solving scheduling and instruction selection for processors extended with a functionally reconfigurable cell fabric. Our method models parallel reconfigurable architectures, the selection of application specific computational patterns and application scheduling. It takes also into account architectural constraints.

This column examines the texture cache, an essential component of modern GPUs that plays an important role in achieving real-time performance when generating realistic images. GPUs have many components and the texture cache is only one of them. But it has a real impact on the performance of the GPU if rasterization and memory tiling are set up correctly.

Cylinder pressure sensors provide detailed information on the diesel engine combustion process. This paper presents a method to use cylinder-pressure data for prediction of engine emissions by exploiting data-mining techniques. The proposed method uses principal component analysis to reduce the dimension of the cylinder-pressure data, and a neural network to model the nonlinear relationship betwee

Cavitation is common in high-pressure homogenizers, and has severe negative effects such as noise and mechanical wear, but may also have a beneficial effect in promoting fragmentation. Greater knowledge concerning cavitation in the homogenizer valve is thus important in optimizing the design and utilization of emulsification equipment. The aim of this study was to locate the region of cavitation a

We propose a powerful hardware architecture for pixel shading, which enables flexible control of shading rates and automatic shading reuse between triangles in tessellated primitives. The main goal is efficient pixel shading for moderately to finely tessellated geometry, which is not handled well by current GPUs. Our method effectively decouples the cost of pixel shading from the geometric complex

Whitewater from production of packaging board was treated in a combined anaerobic/aerobic biokidney, both in laboratory scale and pilot plant experiments. Both the laboratory experiments and the pilot plant trial demonstrate that a combined anaerobic/aerobic process is suitable for treating whitewater from a packaging mill. It is also possible to operate the process at the prevailing whitewater te

Many combinatorial optimization problems lend themselves to be modeled as distributed constraint optimization problems (DisCOP). Problems such as job shop scheduling have an intuitive matching between agents and machines. In distributed constraint problems, agents control variables and are connected via constraints. We have equipped these agents with a full constraint solver. This makes it possibl

Embedded DSP computing is currently shifting towards manycore architectures in order to cope with the ever growing computational demands. Actor based dataflow languages are being considered as a programming model. In this paper we present a code generator for CAL, one such dataflow language. We propose to use a compilation tool with two intermediate representations. We start from a machine model o

As custom architectures become more and more common for DSP applications, instruction selection and scheduling for such applications and architectures become important topics. In this paper, we explore the effects of defining the problem of finding an optimal instruction selection and scheduling as a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP). We incorporate methods based on sub-graph isomorphism and g

Traditional efforts in standardizing video coding used to involve a lengthy process that resulted in large monolithic standards and reference codes. This approach has become increasingly ill-suited to the dynamics and the fast changing needs of the video coding community. Most importantly, there used to be no principled approach to leveraging the significant commonalities between the different cod

A major challenge when designing general purpose graphics hardware is to allow efficient access to texture data. Although different rendering paradigms vary with respect to their data access patterns, there is no flexibility when it comes to data caching provided by the graphics architecture. In this paper we focus on volume ray-casting, and show the benefits of algorithm-aware data caching. Our M

Objective This study provides the summary of current knowledge about migrant work in agriculture available from journal articles, books, reports and other relevant academic publications, focusing on political, economic, legal, social and medical aspects of migrant work in agriculture. Methods A systematic search was carried out on the LibHub and Google Scholar databases in order to compile the e