Ray tracing is one of the most popular techniques for generating photo-realistic images. Extensive research and development work has made interactive static scene rendering realistic. This paper deals with interactive dynamic scene rendering in which not only the eye point but also the objects in the scene change their 3D locations every frame. In order to realize interactive dynamic scene rendering, RTRPS (Ray Tracing based on Ray Plane and Bounding Sphere), which utilizes the coherency in rays, objects, and grouped-rays, is introduced. RTRPS uses bounding spheres as the spatial data structure which utilizes the coherency in objects. By using bounding spheres, RTRPS can ignore the rotation of moving objects within a sphere, and shorten the update time between frames. RTRPS utilizes the coherency in rays by merging rays into a ray-plane, assuming that the secondary rays and shadow rays are shot through an aligned grid. Since a pair of ray-planes shares an original ray, the intersection for the ray can be completed using the coherency in the ray-planes. Because of the three kinds of coherency, RTRPS can significantly reduce the number of intersection tests for ray tracing. Further acceleration techniques for ray-plane-sphere and ray-triangle intersection are also presented. A parallel projection technique converts a 3D vector inner product operation into a 2D operation and reduces the number of floating point operations. Techniques based on frustum culling and binary-tree structured ray-planes optimize the order of intersection tests between ray-planes and a sphere, resulting in 50% to 90% reduction of intersection tests. Two ray-triangle intersection techniques are also introduced, which are effective when a large number of rays are packed into a ray-plane. Our performance evaluations indicate that RTRPS gives 13 to 392 times speed up in comparison with a ray tracing algorithm without organized rays and spheres. We found out that RTRPS also provides competitive performance even if only primary rays are used.

A hybrid memory architecture (HMA) that consists of some distinct memory devices is expected to achieve a good balance between high performance and large capacity. Unlike conventional memory architectures, the HMA needs the metadata for data management since the data are migrated between the memory devices during the execution of an application. The memory controller caches the metadata to avoid accessing the memory devices for the metadata reference. However, as the amount of the metadata increases in proportion to the size of the HMA, the memory controller needs to handle a large amount of metadata. As a result, the memory controller cannot cache all the metadata and increases the number of metadata references. This results in an increase in the access latency to reach the target data and degrades the performance. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a metadata prefetching mechanism for HMAs. The proposed mechanism loads the metadata needed in the near future by prefetching. Moreover, to increase the effect of the metadata prefetching, the proposed mechanism predicts the metadata used in the near future based on an address difference that is the difference between two consecutive access addresses. The evaluation results show that the proposed metadata prefetching mechanism can improve the instructions per cycle by up to 44% and 9% on average.