Table of Contents

Introduction and Overview. Houdini: Multithreading Existing Software. The Presto Execution System: Designing for Multithreading. LibEE: Parallel Evaluation of Character Rigs. Fluids: Simulation on the CPU. Bullet Physics: Simulation with OpenCL. OpenSubdiv: Interoperating GPU Compute and Drawing. Bibliography. Index.

Reviews

"Multithreading applications is hard, but for today’s performance-critical codes, an absolute necessity. This book shows how the latest parallel programming technology can simplify the daunting challenge of producing fast and reliable software for multicore processors. Although the instructive case studies are drawn from visual effects applications, the authors cover the gamut of issues that developers face when parallelizing legacy applications from any domain."
—Charles Leiserson, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory"Multithreading graphics algorithms is a new and exciting area of research. It is crucial to computer graphics. This book will prove invaluable to researchers and practitioners alike. It will have a strong impact on movie visual effects and games."
—Jos Stam, Senior Principal Research Scientist, Autodesk, Inc."Visual effects programming is undergoing a renaissance as high-end videogame effects technology approaches the state-of-the-art defined by blockbuster Hollywood movies, empowered by the capabilities of multi-Teraflop GPU hardware. A wealth of graphics algorithms are now graduating into the realm of real-time rendering, yet today’s programmers face a formidable challenge in structuring these algorithms to take full advantage of today’s multi-core CPU architectures and deliver on their potential.
This book, the collaborative result of many industry luminaries, wonderfully bridges the gap between the theory of multithreading and the practice of multithreading in advanced graphical applications. Join them on this journey to bring real-time visual effects technology to the next level!"
—Tim Sweeney, CEO and Founder of Epic Games"…valuable not just to those in the visual effects arena, but also to developers of high performance software looking to increase performance of their code."
—Scott R. Garrigus, NewTechReview