Proceedings of the Conference on High Performance Graphics 2009

We are pleased to present the proceedings of High-Performance Graphics 2009. This is the first year of this new conference, but the conference's roots run deep and wide because it is the merger of two existing, successful conferences. •Graphics Hardware, an annual conference since 1986 focusing on graphics hardware, architecture, and systems, and •Interactive Ray Tracing, a symposium established in 2006 focusing on the emerging field of interactive ray tracing and global illumination techniques. The goal of combining these two conferences was to bring to authors and attendees the best of both, while extending the scope of the new conference to cover the overarching field of performance-oriented graphics systems covering innovative algorithms, efficient implementations, and hardware architecture. This broader focus offers a common forum bringing together researchers, engineers, and architects to discuss the complex interactions of massively-parallel hardware, novel programming models, efficient graphics algorithms, and innovative applications. The merger of these two conferences had several motivations, but we believe that the primary meaning of the merger is something very exciting. We believe it indicates that ray tracing and graphics hardware are truly coming together, providing graphics hardware with the capabilities and generality of the ray tracing approach, while providing the ray tracing community with wide SIMD many-core platforms and better exposure to the enormous interactive graphics community. In previous years, GH typically received around 25 paper submissions and IRT received around 40. We were delighted to receive 72 submissions to HPG, in spite of a late announcement of the conference to the research community. The submission pool was extremely strong, reflecting the breadth and depth of innovative work in this area. We chose to have a massively-parallel papers committee, with fifty members. This was quite helpful because of the larger-than- expected number of submissions. We also felt it was important to not load the committee members too heavily, since many were also serving on the EGSR, Vis, or Supercomputing committees at the same time. The committee members were very thoughtful and diligent in choosing external reviewers and in providing useful, detailed reviews of their assigned papers. We greatly appreciate their efforts. We depended heavily on the reviews, the reviewer discussion, and the scores, but the final decision on all papers rested with the three of us, as had been the GH tradition. The highest-scored rejected paper scored 3.75 (out of 5.0) and the lowest-scored accepted paper scored 3.0. This reflects the great amount of deliberation over the papers and our goals in selecting papers. We ultimately selected 21 of the 72 papers, a 29% acceptance rate. This was quite competitive, and we hope it will serve to bring respect and quality to the conference, though we ached at some of the rejection decisions. Selecting a set of papers that would satisfy the needs and interests of the GH and IRT communities was our most important task. We tried to find a mix of papers that would have been accepted at the previous conferences. For example, IRT was traditionally friendlier to immediately-actionable practical work than GH, and we tried to preserve that spirit in selecting papers this year. We also especially tried to choose the best of the papers that represented the synergy between the two fields. We thought carefully about what the two fields have to teach each other and selected some papers that we thought would be of particular benefit to the other community than that of the paper's primary topic. Anti-aliasing is one research area where we hope to see the two fields press forward together over the next few years to find improved, unified solutions. Having seen all the submissions and the accepted papers we are very excited about the merged conference and are confident that the merger will bear good fruit. As you read the papers and attend the conference our hope is that you will agree and will benefit from the merged conference and yourself contribute to the field in years to come.