[Bf-cycles] split kernel and CUDA - Bf-cycles Digest, Vol 61, Issue 9

[Marc Binsted]

Dear All,

I first contacted Ton, mid-last year for advice on how to approach you 
guys with a project I am working on.

I would be very interested in being involved with the development of 
Cycles, in particular for performance rendering and baking of physics 
and simulation systems within the GPU. I am currently developing a GPU 
based scalable cluster model for CGI to take advantage of many core 
processing, utilising Blender Cycles, Lux Render, Furry Ball and soon 
Octane, which has taken 18 months so far to research and build. I have 
been working on BVH building(QVBH and SVBH) and sorting algorithms, 
which could possibly be utilised with existing kernels. I have also 
experimented successfully with multi-GPU out-of-core memory and 
inter-GPU communication across PCIe and utilising various RDMA 
techniques, which can be developed as driver-aware with transparent 
operation under the cover however I have not been able to succesfully 
test through application recompiling as yet.

I would like to see the benefits of efficient resource handling and, 
with full GPU utilisation, hence I would be interested to experiment 
with the simulation systems within Blender if anybody is developing GPU 
kernels for it via CUDA/OpenGL and also working with developers involved 
in the Cycles engine, with possible development of a micro-kernel 
library, or run-time compile for more efficient handling of the GPUs, 
scene geometry and work division, optimal tiling dimensions per 
architecture and improved memory handling for large scene files which 
will often defeat the GPU. I have been working with CUDA for a couple of 
years now, and have some knowledge of Nvidia Optix.

I would also like to offer the potential access to the system for 
development, testing and trial renders. A further commercialised system 
will go online later in the year.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards,

Marc Binsted

On 19/05/2016 11:00, bf-cycles-request at blender.org wrote:
> Re: split kernel and CUDA