Generic software framework for a line -buffer based GPU (reconstruction pipeline)

Abstract

As the graphical capabilities of personal computers have increased, hardware manufacturers discovered that there were advantages to creating specialized hardware to perform mathematical operations commonly used in graphics rendering. This eventually resulted in the advent of modern video cards with Graphics Processing Units as their core processing units. Graphics Processing Unit utilize a highly parallel architecture composed of many more but smaller processing elements capable of a high degree of data level parallelism. Graphics Processing Unit are very much designed to be SIMD. This was originally for the purpose of accessing multiple pixels simultaneously to improve computer graphics performance. This paper presents a generic software framework for a line - buffer based image reconstruction pipeline. The presented framework is capable of operating in low-memory environments and significantly eases algorithm insertions, changes of processing order, and other pipeline management tasks. The savings in development time can be even months. In addition, our experiments show that it offers over 99% memory savings compared with traditional implementations using a matrix-matrix Multiplication for construction with ping-pong buffer scheme full-sized image buffers. The implemented framework also enhances processing performance due to better cache usage and increases flexibility with various pipeline configurations.