Arches: A Cycle-Level Hardware Simulation Framework for Exploring Massively Parallel Ray Tracing Architectures

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dc.contributor.authorHaydel, Jacoben_US
dc.contributor.authorBhokare, Gauraven_US
dc.contributor.authorZeng, Kunnongen_US
dc.contributor.authorHong, Pengpeien_US
dc.contributor.authorKondguli, Sushanten_US
dc.contributor.authorBudge, Brianen_US
dc.contributor.authorBrunvand, Eriken_US
dc.contributor.authorYuksel, Cemen_US
dc.contributor.editorKnoll, Aaronen_US
dc.contributor.editorPeters, Christophen_US
dc.date.accessioned2025-06-20T07:31:54Z
dc.date.available2025-06-20T07:31:54Z
dc.date.issued2025
dc.description.abstractWe introduce Arches, a hardware simulation framework designed to explore and evaluate massively parallel ray-tracing architectures. Operating at the cycle level, Arches captures detailed performance metrics, including computational throughput, onchip data movement across processors, caches, and off-chip communication via an accurate memory system model. The framework is modular, allowing flexible configuration and interconnection of processor cores, caches, and custom hardware units, enabling easy exploration of diverse hardware architectures. Arches supports high-performance parallel execution, simulating complex ray tracing workloads to image completion. It leverages the GNU toolchain, allowing users to write C++ software targeting both the simulated architecture and native execution for debugging, including support for custom instructions to control specialized hardware components. The framework provides comprehensive performance instrumentation, offering insights into time-varying statistics across all modules and identifying performance bottlenecks. Our evaluations demonstrate that Arches delivers performance estimates closely matching real hardware, offering faster and more accurate simulations than existing open-source hardware simulators. Its modularity also makes it a valuable tool for exploring alternative parallel computing strategies for high-performance ray tracing, and its extensibility enables adaptation for other workloads or general-purpose computation.en_US
dc.description.number8
dc.description.sectionheadersGraphics Simulators, Systems and Compilers
dc.description.seriesinformationComputer Graphics Forum
dc.description.volume44
dc.identifier.doi10.1111/cgf.70212
dc.identifier.issn1467-8659
dc.identifier.pages11 pages
dc.identifier.urihttps://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.70212
dc.identifier.urihttps://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.1111/cgf70212
dc.publisherThe Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.en_US
dc.rightsAttribution 4.0 International License
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.subjectCCS Concepts: Computing methodologies → Graphics processors; Ray tracing
dc.subjectComputing methodologies → Graphics processors
dc.subjectRay tracing
dc.titleArches: A Cycle-Level Hardware Simulation Framework for Exploring Massively Parallel Ray Tracing Architecturesen_US
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