Blue-Steel is a parallel ray tracer for generating high
quality animations of 3 dimensional scenes constructed of triangles
and spheres, with a variety of different lights and procedural
shaders.
Distributing the work for this normally time-intensive process across
the six SPEs of the Cell processor in the PS3 allows
us to create very complex looking scenes with objects, lights, and
materials updated dynamically every animation frame, and render these
scenes at interactive rates between 10 and 15 frames per second. We
demonstrated Blue-Steel using a variant of the classic Pong
game.
In less than four weeks, we achieved quite a bit. On February 1, we
presented a short-demo of Blue-Steel.
Click the play button on the right to
watch it.
The demo visually demonstrates the performance scalability we achieve
by leveraging more and more SPEs to increase the ray tracer
throughput.
We are making available our source code for download
under the terms of the MIT Open
Source License. The tar ball includes a README file with an overview of the code organization, a Makefile to build
the code on a PS3 with the latest Cell SDK available from developerWorks.
The code was developed on a PS3 running Yellow Dog Linux. We also included a prebuilt binary of our Pong game that you can play on your PS3 using a standard PS3 6-axis controller.
