Hmm… Not the official title of my fourth semester project at Aalborg University. For which I just got an A… and have been thinking about publishing since I handed it in.

This semester my group have designed and implemented a small statically typed object oriented language slightly inspired by Python. We wrote our own lexer and parser generator in Python, and implemented the compiler in C++. And just for the record we implemented the DFA of the lexer and PDA of the parser using goto’s, inspired by re2c, this was quite fun and the result very fast.

The language is called groo (that was the best name we could come up with), it compiles into gril (groo intermediate language) which in turn run on VROOM (groo virtual machine) where memory is managed by MOM (Mark-sweep Object Manager). Whilst this isn’t the best project yet, and all the acronyms doesn’t make much sens, I really like to say that when we need to release memory we call MOM to clean up
(I appoligies for my crazy sens of humor).

I don’t think the project is of much use to anybody else… But if you want to play with simple, well documented compiler in C++, this might be it… Also the parser generator is AFAIK pretty unique, haven’t see anybody else implement a parser using goto’s… Anyway the project report and groo compiler source code is all in English and available here:

• Project report (1.5 MiB PDF)
• Compiler source code (16,5 MiB tarball)

Now I’m finally done with my second semester project at Aalborg University, and as usually I publish my things here. This project is about distributed realtime ray tracing. Which have been fun, because ray tracing is CPU bound and it have been a joy to play with all sorts of hacks and optimizations.

The report discusses what the demand for ray tracing is, what ray tracing is and how a ray tracer can be implemented, covering the basics of ray tracing and bounding volume hierarchies. It also discusses how distribution could be done, which is the only slightly new thing in it… It’s not a perfect report there’s still some areas where the English is kind of bad and some sections that could use a rewrite or two
Nevertheless, considering the circumstances I’m satified the result. And the group have worked fine…

Now the interesting part, TheMatrixDistributed, as a part of this project we implemented a distributed realtime ray tracer, with bounding volume hierarchies, spheres, planes and triangles that supports textures. We also did a small obj parser to import models exported from Blender. TheMatrixDistributed is implemented in C++ and it’s turned out to be quite fast, considering that the rest of my group have little to no programming experirence. When distribution to 6 dualcore laptops and a quadcore desktop we got around 8 FPS at best with 1024×768 screen and about 100,000 triangles in the scene, not filling the entire screen.

The frontpage image (original 1024×768) seen above has about 1,000,000 triangles it was render on 6 dualcore laptops and a quadcore desktop at about 0.6 FPS with 4x antialias.

Though the report and TheMatrixDistributed probably isn’t of much value to anybody it’s published here if anybody should be interested. The report is released under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 and TheMatrixDistributed is released under GNU GPL.

• Realtime ray tracing distributed (twoside)
• TheMatrixDistributed (source and binaries)