TUTORIALS
Tutorial 3: GPGPU: General Purpose Computation on Graphics Processors
Organizer: Aaron Lefohn, University of California, Davis
Speakers: Ian Buck, Stanford University; John Owens, University of California, Davis; Robert Strzodka Caesar Institute, Bonn, Germany

In the last three years, commodity graphics processors (GPUs) have evolved from fixed-function graphics units into powerful data-parallel processors. These streaming processors are capable of sustaining computation rates of greater than ten times that of a single CPU. Researchers in the evolving field of general-purpose computation on graphics processors (GPGPU) have demonstrated mappings to these processors for a wide range of computationally intensive tasks. Examples include ray tracing, molecular dynamics, and surface processing. This tutorial provides a detailed introduction and overview of the GPGPU field to the visualization community. Attendees will gain an understanding of modern GPU architecture, the GPGPU programming model, and the techniques and tools required to apply GPUs to their own applications.