A Hands-on Environment for Teaching GPU Programming

Short Description
GPU programming is fast becoming an essential skill for. computer graphics students. … GPU programming course with a hands-on program called …

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Content
A Hands-on Environment for Teaching GPU Programming
Mike Bailey
Oregon State University
2117 Kelley Engineering Center
Corvallis, OR 97331-5501
+1.541.737.2542
mjb@cs.oregonstate.edu
Steve Cunningham
Grinnell College
715 Mesquite Drive
Coralville, IA 52241
+1.319.351.6800
cunningham@siggraph.org
ABSTRACT
GPU programming is fast becoming an essential skill for
computer graphics students. It has immediate application in all
areas of graphics including science, engineering, art, animation,
and gaming. Because it is new, experience with teaching GPU
programming is scarce. This paper describes the teaching of a
GPU programming course with a hands-on program called
glman. glman allows students to create a shader scene
description file which not only creates the 3D scene, but creates
an interactive user interface to adjust shader parameters. Our
experience in an experimental class taught in Spring 2006 is that
glman is flexible enough to demonstrate and experiment with
many shader concepts, and creates a fast and fun learning curve
for the students.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
1.3 [Computer Graphics], 1.3.1 [Graphics Processors], K.3.1
[Computer Uses in Education]
Keywords
Computer graphics, GPU, game development, graphics shaders,
visualization
1. INTRODUCTION
GPU-programmable shaders are the most exciting development
in…