Point Containment Queries on Ray-Tracing Cores for AMR Flow Visualization

Modern graphics processing units come with dedicated hardware to perform ray/triangle intersections and bounding volume hierarchy traversal. While the primary use case for this hardware is photorealistic 3-D computer graphics, with careful algorithm design scientists can also use this special-purpose hardware to accelerate general-purpose computations, such as point containment queries. This article explains the principles behind these techniques and their application to vector field visualization of large simulation data using particle tracing.