Marc Olano and Mark Bolstad, CSEE Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Whether it is for the quest of increased visual realism in cinema,
or in the processing of the latest scientific data sets, the sizes of
models being rendered are becoming larger. As this trend continues, the
number of elements in a single object will exceed four billion, thus
requiring 64-bit data structures to reference the components of the object,
and new techniques and algorithms to efficiently render the object.
Currently, scenes consisting of multiple objects are approaching the 64-bit
barrier. We are developing new parallel algorithms to render models of
extreme complexity, designed to scale with the number of geometric
primitives rather than the number of pixels or rays.