The goal of course projects is to give students the opportunity to gain hands on research experience in graphics systems. Working individually or in teams, you are expected to identify and investigate a current challenge in high-performance graphics system design. (Note: valid projects topics include both improvements to graphics systems and research related to algorithms/applications that stand to influence the design of these systems.) You will need to become familiar with recent literature relevant to your topic, propose a plan of work that (ideally) will contribute to the state of the art, and then describe your work via a conference-style write-up as well as a in a presentation to the class. The hope is that the best projects begin a line of research that can be further pursued toward eventual conference submission.

• Friday Oct 7th: Project Proposal. (3-4 page document) Please describe your project plans by addressing the following issues:
• A brief description of the project. This description should include a summary of the problem you are trying to solve, what you will do, and as well as the potential impact of success (e.g., what will we understand that we didn't know before). I'd like you to split your "what I will do" section into two parts, a section for (1) "what I must get done", and a section for (2) "what I'd like to get done if things go really well". Please also include an argument for why this project relates to 15-869 course material.
• If this is a group project, please describe your plan for partitioning work amongst the team.
• As is often the case in research projects, it can be hard to predict how long certain tasks will take. However, keeping a schedule, and keeping it updated as the project proceeds, is still a good way to give yourself a global view of your project. Provide a schedule of what you hope to have done at the two intermediate project checkpoints (see dates below). Keep in mind the breakdown between "what I must do" and "what I hope to do if things go really well".
• Provide a brief outline of your expected final writeup. This outline might include a list of papers constituting related work and a list of experiments you hope to run (or demos you hope to give).
• List resources you require to be successful (including systems you already have access to).
• Friday Oct 14th: Literature Survey. (2-3 pages + bibliography). Please provide a summary of relevant work in the field. A good literature survey focuses not on the details of what previous reseachers did, but how these previous approaches relate to your proposal. How is your approach different than previous approaches? Can previous work be taxonomized, lending to a simpler description of how your work fits in?
• Friday Oct 28th: Checkpoint 1. (4-5 page design document + 1-2 page schedule update). Please provide a technical write-up descriping how your system/algorithms work. From this document I should be able to understand exactly what you are building. In addition, please provide a 1-2 page update of your project schedule. This update should indicate what items were completed successfully, and how the last 6 weeks of the project have changed.
• Friday Nov 18th: Checkpoint 2. (1-2 page schedule update). Please provide another schedule update summarizing project progress. If applicable, initial results would be interesting to see at this time.
• Friday Dec 16th: Final project Presentation. 15 minute talk to class. Held during class exam slot.
• Sunday Dec 18th, 11:59 PM: Final Project Report. (~10 page paper). Your final project report is expected to read much like a conference paper. It should include a description of related work (with bibiography), project goals, the methods used or system built, your experimental setup, results/key findings, and potential future work.

• NVIDIA's software rasterizer. (implemented in CUDA) Full source is available on Google Code. This is one of the fastest software rasterization-based pipelines available and would be a good starting point for experimental pipeline modification projects. The code is described in the High Performance Graphics 2011 paper High-Performance Software Rasterization on GPUs (Laine et al.)
• Intel SPMD Program Compiler. This open source compiler available from Intel is very much like a shader compiler. It takes as impact sequential code in a C-like language, and generates optimized vector instruction streams as output.
• NVIDIA Tegra Development Kits. If we ask nicely support from NVIDIA may be possible.
• Conference Proceedings. You may wish to peruse the proceedings of conferences such as SIGGRAPH, Graphics Hardware (up until 2009), High Performance Graphics (2009 and later), or the IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing (2008, 2009)
• Class slides on project ideas.