High-Performance Computation of Bézier Surfaces on Parallel and Heterogeneous Platforms

Abstract

Bézier surfaces are mathematical tools employed in a wide variety of applications. Some works in the literature propose parallelization strategies to improve performance for the computation of Bézier surfaces. These approaches, however, are mainly focused on graphics applications and often are not directly applicable to other domains. In this work, we propose a new method for the computation of Bézier surfaces, together with approaches to efficiently map the method onto different platforms (CPUs, discrete and integrated GPUs). Additionally, we explore CPU–GPU cooperation mechanisms for computing Bézier surfaces using two integrated heterogeneous systems with different characteristics. An exhaustive performance evaluation—including different data-types, rendering and several hardware platforms—is performed. The results show that our method achieves speedups as high as 3.12x (double-precision) and 2.47x (single-precision) on CPU, and 3.69x (double-precision) and 13.14x (single-precision) on GPU compared to other methods in the literature. In heterogeneous platforms, the CPU–GPU cooperation increases the performance up to 2.09x with respect to the GPU-only version. Our method and the associated parallelization approaches can be easily employed in domains other than computer-graphics (e.g., image registration, bio-mechanical modeling and flow simulation), and extended to other Bézier formulations and Bézier constructions of higher order than surfaces.