Improving program productivity, performance and portability through a high level language for graphics and game development

Our work focuses on the area of using a high level language to improve program productivity, performance and portability. In general, this has been an area of intense research. There are a number of previous efforts including ZPL [Chamberlain and et al 2004], X10/Fortress/Chapel from IBM/SUN/Cray [Weiland 2007], Intel's CT/RapidMind [McCool 2006] and parallel VSIPL++ [Lebak and et al 2005] to name a few. However, while these languages do great things in simplifying parallel implementation of code, extensions beyond that are limited. The primary exception to this is VSIPL++ which implements several high level functions useful to the signal processing community. While most of these languages can be used to implement graphics or game related algorithms if necessary, none of them attempt to provide a platform that makes such development particularly easy. On the other hand, high level engines such as Renderman and Unreal provide the wanted abstractions but with little or no guarantees about extensibility, portability, or parallel performance. Our research focuses on adapting the parallel VSIPL++ API from the signal processing community to the graphics and game development environment.