A hands-on environment for teaching GPU programming

ABSTRACT

GPU programming is fast becoming an essential skill for computer graphics students. It has immediate application in all areas of graphics including science, engineering, art, animation, and gaming. Because it is new, experience with teaching GPU programming is scarce. This paper describes the teaching of a GPU programming course with a hands-on program called glman. glman allows students to create a shader scene description file which not only creates the 3D scene, but creates an interactive user interface to adjust shader parameters. Our experience in an experimental class taught in Spring 2006 is that glman is flexible enough to donstrate and experiment with many shader concepts, and creates a fast and fun learning curve for the students.

REFERENCES

• 1: Anthony A. Apodaca , Larry Gritz , Brian A. Barsky, Advanced RenderMan: Creating CGI for Motion Picture, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 1999
• 2: John Conway, in "Mathatical Games", Scientific American, October 1970.
• 3: Randima Fernando, GPU Gs, NVIDIA, 2004.
• 4: http://www.gpgpu.org
• 5: Ken Perlin, An image synthesizer, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.19 n.3, p.287-296, Jul. 1985
• 6: Ken Perlin, Improving noise, ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), v.21 n.3, July 2002
• 7: Matt Pharr and Randima Fernando, GPU Gs 2, NVIDIA, 2005.
• 8: Randi J. Rost, OpenGL(R) Shading Language (2nd Edition), Addison-Wesley Professional, 2005
• 9: Steve Upstill, The RenderMan Companion, Addison-Wesley, 1990.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.0 General

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.1 Hardware architecture
          Subjects: Graphics processors

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.3 COMPUTERS AND EDUCATION
      K.3.1 Computer Uses in Education

General Terms:
Documentation, Performance, Theory

Keywords:
GPU, computer graphics, game development, graphics shaders, visualization