Principal Investigator Christoph Reinhart
Project Website http://web.mit.edu/sustainabledesignlab/projects/Accelerad/index.html
Accelerad is a free suite of programs for lighting and daylighting analysis and visualization. The suite uses physically-based backward ray tracing algorithms inspired by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s popular Radiance software suite by Greg Ward. These algorithms are accelerated up to twenty times faster using OptiX™, a ray tracing engine built for the graphics processor unit (GPU). The acceleration factor scales with the number of available GPUs and is expected to increase on new generations of hardware. In order to allow for smooth adoption among Radiance users and software developers, Accelerad maintains compatibility with Radiance scene and output file formats and uses a subset of Radiance’s material modifiers and command-line arguments.
Accelerad is designed to make new types of simulation possible that are currently too time-consuming for computation on the CPU. It is ideal for rpict renderings with large numbers of ambient bounces or rtrace calculations over many thousands of sensor points.