Parallel@Illinois Special Seminar Series

Graphics and High Performance Consumer Gaming

Wednesday, March 18^th at 4:15 pm CT, B02 CSL

John Hart, Professor of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

ABSTRACT: Graphics applications have a long history of pushing the performance envelope of consumer applications, due to the real-time constraints of animation and user interaction. This talk describes a variety of computer graphics algorithms for photorealistic rendering, shape modeling, texturing and painting, and the insane steps we’ve taken to get them to run fast, moving them from the CPU to the GPU and now back to the CPU again. We will also discuss our current UPCRC project for photorealistic dynamic virtual environments, and touch on future high-performance applications for consumer computing that will require even higher performance for understanding and improving consumer media content.

BIO: John C. Hart is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he teaches computer graphics and scientific visualization. His work on multicore graphics, GPU algorithms, shape modeling and rendering are supported by Adobe, Intel, Microsoft, NAVTEQ, NVIDIA and the NSF. He is a past Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Graphics, a co-author of "Real-Time Shading," a contributing author for "Texturing and Modeling: A Procedural Approach" and an executive producer of the documentary "The Story of Computer Graphics." He received his B.S. from Aurora University in 1987, and a Ph.D. in 1991 from the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago.