GPU-based four-dimensional general-relativistic ray tracing Original Research Article

This paper presents a new general-relativistic ray tracer that enables image synthesis on an interactive basis by exploiting the performance of graphics processing units (GPUs). The application is capable of visualizing the distortion of the stellar background as well as trajectories of moving astronomical objects orbiting a compact mass. Its source code includes metric definitions for the Schwarzschild and Kerr spacetimes that can be easily extended to other metric definitions, relying on its object-oriented design. The basic functionality features a scene description interface based on the scripting language Lua, real-time image output, and the ability to edit almost every parameter at runtime. The ray tracing code itself is implemented for parallel execution on the GPU using NVidia’s Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA), which leads to performance improvement of an order of magnitude compared to a single CPU and makes the application competitive with small CPU cluster architectures.