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Welcome
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General -
Site
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samedi, 12 juin 2004 |

Welcome on my personal and technical website. The aim of this website is to publish different projects I make as part of my studies, internships or simply during my free time, mainly related to Computer Graphics, real time 3D programming and scientific visualisation. The second goal of this website is to provide technical news about GPU related subjects.
Cyril
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TechnoBlog -
GPU
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jeudi, 14 août 2008 |
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I am at the Siggraph OpenGL 3.0 right now and NVIDIA just gives us the link to their first driver supporting OpenGL 3.0 (with some limitations yet).
The driver can be downloaded here :
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/opengl_3_driver.html
I will do a complete post on OpenGL 3.0 in a few days, but as you may know it is not the OpenGL 3.0 we were waiting for, since the complete rebuild of the API have not been done (the main idea of Long Peak). But it don't seems so bad that we could have been afraid of, a deprecation and profiles mechanism have been introduced and everybody here seems to be confident on its usage and capacity to enhance OpenGL evolution speed.
ATI is also here, and they announced their GL3.0 drivers for Q1 2009... Hum I don't know why I doubt we will get full functional GL3.0 support for them at this date, even if it is already late compared to NVIDIA.
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TechnoBlog -
GPU
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mardi, 29 juillet 2008 |
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We have been without news of OpenGL 3.0 for nearly 9 months now, a specification was promised for September 2007 at Siggraph last year and then no news after an ARB member reported that the spec was not ready since there was some unresolved issues they had to address. This situation started to becomes really worrying and a lot of speculations have been made on this delay (see opengl.org forum). The most likely thing is that there have been some disagreements inside ARB members that delayed the spec release.
But recently we had two comforting news tending to prove that OpenGL 3.0 is not dead. The first thing is the creation of the OpenGL 3.0 website with announcements for the Siggraph OpenGL BOF :
- "OpenGL 3.0 Specification Overview"
- "OpenGL hardware and driver plans - AMD, Intel, NVIDIA"
- "Developer's perspective on OpenGL 3.0 "
The second think is a leeked picture of an NVidia presentation slide about their future drivers release (codename Big Bang 2, see the news here) where can distinguiche a reference to OpenGL 3.0 support for September. This tend to prove that the specification is now almost done and the IHV are already working on implementation.
I will be at Siggraph this year and I will be at the OpenGL BOF, I hope I will be able to the the final spec here !
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TechnoBlog -
GPU
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jeudi, 29 mai 2008 |
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There is a very interesting article on G80/G92 hardware architecture just published by NVIDIA guys (hardware architects) in the March/April edition of IEEE Micro:
NVIDIA Tesla: A Unified Graphics and Computing Architecture
Erik Lindholm, NVIDIA
John Nickolls, NVIDIA
Stuart Oberman, NVIDIA
John Montrym, NVIDIA
The full article can be downloaded here: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4523358
Most of the informations can be found or deduced from the CUDA manual but there is also few details about hardware model in this article that was not given before as directly by NVIDIA. Especially, there is mention of Fragments grouped into 2x2 to be scheduled into Warps, a thing we deduced with our G80 hardware analysis (http://www.icare3d.org/GPU/CN08).There is also the firstpicture of the G80 die publicly avalable (hum ok, not very clear and in grayscale) !
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TechnoBlog -
GPU
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jeudi, 24 avril 2008 |
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The the French national High-Performance Computing organization (GENCI) composed among others by the French Atomic Energy Authority (CEA) just order to Bull one of the first supercomputer (a large-scale PC cluster) using an hybrid architecture exploiting GPUs as high performance computational resource. This cluster will be part of CCRT (the Center for Research and Technology computing) and installed in the the French Atomic Energy Authority's Directorate of Military Affairs center (CEA/DAM) of Bruyères le Châtel.
This cluster will use 48 NVidia Tesla GPU modules that are very likely to be based on the next NVIDIA processor generation, the GT200, especially because this generation will support double precision (64 bits floating points) in hardware (but the question is still the cost of this). Each GPU module is said to be composed of 512 cores that let supposed that they will be composed of two GT200 GPUs providing 256 Stream Processors each. Since I already heard rumors about a 240 Stream Processors configuration for the GT200, it is likely to be composed of 16 Multi Processors of 16 Stream Processors each. This would allow a GTX version composed of 15 MP and an ultra version composed of 16MP.
I know quite well the CEA/DAM center since I did an internship here a few years ago, and I know a few guys here who I am sure will be very happy with this new very cool toy ! ;-D
Sources:
- http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/43165-premier-supercalculateur-GPU-France-Tesla.htm
- http://www.wcm.bull.com/internet/pr/rend.jsp?DocId=350335&lang=fr
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TechnoBlog -
GPU
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jeudi, 17 avril 2008 |
 NVIDIA just published a Beta version of CUDA 2.0 with associated SDK. Among other things, it brings Windows Vista support. Linux support should follow soon. The really good new for graphics programmers is that 3D texture access is now supported within the API :-D
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TechnoBlog -
GPU
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lundi, 14 avril 2008 |
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Nvidia has released a few days ago an online version of GPU Gems: Programming Techniques, Tips, and Tricks for Real-Time Graphics, the first tome of what I consider as one of the best GPU book series.
GPU Gems is a compilation of articles covering practical
real-time graphics techniques arising from the research and practice of
cutting-edge developers. It focuses on the programmable graphics
pipeline available in today's graphics processing units (GPUs) and
highlights quick and dirty tricks used by leading developers, as well
as fundamental, performance-conscious techniques for creating advanced
visual effects. The contributors and editors, collectively, bring
countless years of experience to enlighten and propel the reader into
the fascinating world of programmable real-time graphics.
The book can be read here: http://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems.
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TechnoBlog -
GPU
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vendredi, 07 mars 2008 |
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For today GPU generation, we know a lot more about the hardware
mechanism than for previous GPU generation, in particular thanks to the
window open on this hardware by Cuda. But many hardware details are
still hidden to the programmer, in particular mechanisms used for
primitives rasterisation and fragments shading. As understanding how
fragments are scheduled among the G80 processing units is a critical
points for the research we do with Fabrice Neyret as part of my PhD, I
wrote a small program allowing to investigate this point.
We also wrote a document that presents our motivations for this work,
the experiments we made yet and the results and answers we get: http://www.icare3d.org/GPU/CN08
We hope this document will give you useful informations. We don't
want it to be closed and we want to make it evolve through new
experiments and also thanks to exterior comments you can let at the
bottom of this page.
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TechnoBlog -
GPU
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mercredi, 27 février 2008 |
 After having released 2D hardware registers informations for their R5xx and R6xx GPUs a few months ago, AMD/ATI has just published the first bits of open-source 3D programming documentation for their R5xx GPUs (Radeon HD X1000 class cards). Even if R5xx are pretty old now, AMD plans to released 3D specifications for their R6xx (Radeon HD X2000 class cards) last architecture (supporting SM 4.0 and featuring unified shader architecture like the G80) very soon. This release is part of a large AMD plans to open up their whole hardware allowing the development of an open source driver fully supporting the last ATI chips (more infos here). As ATI have never been able to develop correct OpenGL support (nor linux drivers), it sounds for me also like a very good news for OpenGL support on ATI hardware. Who know maybe will we get OpenGL 3.0 support on ATI before on NVidia hardware... Hum, sounds like science fiction !
As for Intel's documentations published a few weeks ago (see here ), these documentations gives very interesting details on the hardware architecture but this time for a "true" high performance 3D architecture. Among the areas covered in this guide are the general command processor,
vertex shaders and fragment shaders, Hyper-Z, and the various 3D registers.
In addition to these specifications, AMD should release soon the source of their new proprietary OpenGL implementation as well as their "TCore" tool, a kind of GPU emulator used internally to test software code before chips availability.
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TechnoBlog -
GPU
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lundi, 04 février 2008 |
 Intel just released publicly the full technical informations and hardware specifications of their unified Shader Model 4 class i965 and G35 chipsets and graphics processor. These specifications concern all the GPU parts (2D, 3D and video encoding and decoding) and will allow third party open source drivers development.
Among other things, it includes very detailed and interesting informations on graphics pipeline shaders hardware implementation, like hardware states, internal formats, rasterisation policies and threads batching. Even if Intel don't provide the highest performance hardware, these specification are very interesting and gives a good idea on how this kind of hardware can work internally.
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TechnoBlog -
GPU
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lundi, 03 décembre 2007 |
 Wladimir Jasper van der Laan released a few week ago a disassembler for CUDA G80/G90 CUBIN (CUDA true hardware binary NVidia never described) and today he just released a first version of an assembler for this format. With these two tools, we now have an entire toolchain allowing very interesting optimization on the code produced by CUDA.
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TechnoBlog -
GPU
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samedi, 25 août 2007 |
 Il y a presque un an maintenant, le groupe Khronos auquel venait d'être transféré le contrôle d'OpenGL dévoilait l'avenir vers lequel s'orientait notre API préférée (enfin la mienne en tout cas ;-): Noms de code "Longs Peak" et "Mt. Evans", deux révisions prévues pour 2007 et qui constituent beaucoup plus qu'une simple évolution de l'API. C'est finalement il y a quelques semaines, au SIGGRAPH 2007, qu'a été officiellement présenté et baptisé "Longs Peak": OpenGL 3.0.
Je vais, dans cet article, essayer de présenter rapidement les changements que vont apporter ces nouvelles versions. Enfilez donc vos baudriers et chaussons d'escalade, ca grimpe ;-)
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