1st International Symposium on CELL Computing (CCS 2006)
Motivation
History has shown that innovations in special purpose hardware eventually become generalized and incorporated into general-purpose processor architectures. Today it is readily obvious that multi-core, multi-processor architectures will be at the heart of all the major next generation computing systems. Current industry processor trends indicate an increasing emphasis on parallelism, in multiple forms including: instruction-level, statement-level, thread-level, and stream-level parallelism. In addition, as the demand for real-time photo-realism increases in the games industry, another trend is moving towards the reliance on global illumination techniques in real-time. These global illumination techniques inherently lend themselves to highly parallel architectures. Although the supercomputing industry has extensively researched parallel algorithms, the emphasis predominantly has been on parallelizing a single simulation on a cluster of workstations. There is little work available on parallelizing games, which incorporate multiple interacting physical simulations as well as tasks such as user input, music, and rendering.