Massively Parallel BVH Construction Using Mini-trees

Abstract: The Bounding Volume Hierarchy is an acceleration data structure used in ray tracing, allowing for faster intersection tests between rays and triangles. The goal of this thesis was to take one algorithm for rapidly generating such data structures, the Bonsai algorithm, which was initially implemented on a CPU, and instead implement it on a graphics processing unit. Many parts of the al- gorithm go very well together with the massive parallelism of a graphics card. However, the resulting algorithm was considerably slower than the original.