Multithreading for visual effects

Table of Contents
Introduction and Overview James Reinders
Introduction
Overview of Case Studies
Motivation
Program in Tasks, Not Threads
Value of Abstraction
Scaling and Vectorization
Advancing Programming Languages for Parallel Programming
Parallel Programming in C and C++
Data Movement and Layout
Summary
Additional Reading

Houdini: Multithreading Existing Software Jeff Lait
What Is Houdini?
Rewrite or Refactor
Patterns
Copy on Write
Dependencies
OpenCL

The Presto Execution System: Designing for Multithreading George ElKoura
Introduction
Presto
Presto's Execution System
User Extensions
Memory Access Patterns
Flexibility to Experiment
Multithreading Strategies
Background Execution
Other Multithreading Strategies
Debugging and Profiling Tools
Summary

LibEE: Parallel Evaluation of Character Rigs Martin Watt
Introduction
Motivation
Specific Requirements for Character Animation Graph
Threadsafety
Scalability: Software Considerations
Scalability: Hardware Considerations
Production Considerations
Threading Visualization Tool
Rig Optimization Case Studies
Overall Performance Results
Limits of Scalability
Summary

Fluids: Simulation on the CPU Ronald D. Henderson
Motivation
Programming Models
Fluid Simulation
Summary

Bullet Physics: Simulation with OpenCL Erwin Coumans
Introduction
Rewriting from Scratch Using OpenCL
GPU Spatial Acceleration Structures
GPU Contact Point Generation
GPU Constraint Solving

OpenSubdiv: Interoperating GPU Compute and Drawing Manuel Kraemer
Representing Shapes
The Control Cage
Uniform Subdivision
Serializing the Mesh Representation
Transition from Multicores to Many-Cores
Reducing Branching Divergence
Optimization Trade-Offs
Evaluating Our Progress
Fundamental Limitations of Uniform Subdivision
Feature Adaptive Subdivision
Implementing the GPU Rendering Engine
Texturing
Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

In Multithreading for Visual Effects, developers from DreamWorks Animation, Pixar, Side Effects, Intel, and AMD share their successes and failures in the messy real-world application area of production software. They provide practical advice on multithreading techniques and visual effects used in popular visual effects libraries (such as Bullet, OpenVDB, and OpenSubdiv), one of the industry’s leading visual effects packages (Houdini), and proprietary animation systems. This information is valuable not just to those in the visual effects arena, but also to developers of high performance software looking to increase performance of their code.

Diverse Solutions to Solve Performance Problems

After an introductory chapter, each subsequent chapter presents a case study that illustrates how the authors used multithreading techniques to achieve better performance. The authors discuss the problems that occurred and explain how they solved them. The case studies encompass solutions for shaving milliseconds, solutions for optimizing longer running tasks, multithreading techniques for modern CPU architectures, and massive parallelism using GPUs. Some of the case studies include open source projects so you can try out these techniques for yourself and see how well they work.

https://www.routledge.com/Multithreading-for-Visual-Effects/Watt-Coumans-ElKoura-Henderson-Kraemer-Lait-Reinders/p/book/9781482243567