Video: Reliving the First Moon Landing with NVIDIA RTX real-time Ray Tracing

In this video, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin looks back at the first moon landing with help from a reenactment powered by NVIDIA RTX GPUs with real-time ray tracing technology. “The result: a beautiful, near-cinematic depiction of one of history’s great moments. That’s thanks to NVIDIA RTX GPUs, which allowed our demo team to create an interactive visualization that incorporates light in the way it actually works, giving the scene uncanny realism.”

Ray Tracing on Intel Xeon Phi with Embree

In computer graphics, ray tracing is a rendering technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light as pixels in an image plane and simulating the effects of its encounters with virtual objects. “Experienced computer graphics developers that understand how ray tracing works, in conjunction with a deep knowledge of the Intel Xeon Phi processor hardware have created a set of ray tracing kernels that take advantage of the underlying instruction sets and the available number of computing cores.”

Tracing Radio Frequencies with Intel Xeon Phi

An interesting use of HPC technologies is in the area of understanding the propagation of radio frequency energy in an outdoor environment. “Applications of this type need to be completed in seconds to minutes to be useful. Since the tracing of each ray is independent of another ray, this type of application can be distributed easily among the many cores of the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor.”

Ray Tracing with Embree Kernels using Intel Xeon Phi

The Embree kernel approach, using the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor is applicable to many situations. The implementation can be tuned to the hardware available, using different vector widths and workloads per ray. With a flexible toolkit for rendering, applications can take advantage of the latest hardware acceleration to achieve maximum performance.