Seminars & Colloquia
Pat Hanrahan
Stanford University
"Shading Languages and the Emergence of Programmable Graphics Systems"
Monday November 07, 2022 04:00 PM
Location: Room 011, Sitterson Hall, UNC CH Off-Campus
Zoom Meeting Info (Visitor parking instructions)
This talk is part of the Triangle Computer Science Distinguished Lecturer Series
Pixar’s RenderMan was created for this purpose, and has been widely used in feature film production. A key innovation in the system is to use a shading language to procedurally describe appearance. Shading languages were subsequently extended to run in real-time on graphics processing units (GPUs), and now shading languages are widely used in game engines. The final step was the realization that the GPU is a data-parallel computer, and the shading language could be extended into a general-purpose data-parallel programming language. This enabled a wide variety of applications in high performance computing, such as physical simulation and machine learning, to be run on GPUs. Nowadays, GPUs are the fastest computers in the world. This talk will review the history of shading languages and GPUs, and discuss the broader implications for computing.
Host: Henry Fuchs, UNC CH