Matt
Pharr

 matt at pharr dot org (personal)
 matt dot pharr at intel dot com (work)

: about :

I am the architecture lead in the Advanced Rendering Technology group at Intel, where I am fortunate to have the opportunity to be part of an amazing team working on some very interesting problems in interactive rendering.

Previously, I co-founded Neoptica, which worked on programming models for graphics on heterogeneous CPU+GPU computer systems. Neoptica was acquired by Intel in the Fall of 2007. I gave a keynote at Graphics Hardware 2006 that got some attention; it outlined some of the context behind our goals at Neoptica.

Before Neoptica, I was in the Software Architecture group at NVIDIA, co-founded Exluna (acquired by NVIDIA, February 2002), worked in Pixar's Rendering R&D group, and was a graduate student in the Stanford Graphics Lab, where I worked on rendering algorithms and systems, including both the theoretical foundations of rendering as well as software design and systems issues. My thesis was about a new theoretical framework for rendering centered on scattering rather than light transport as the basic abstraction. Pat Hanrahan was my advisor.

While at NVIDIA, I had the opportunity to edit the book GPU Gems 2: Programming Techniques for High-Performance Graphics and General Purpose Computation. The first half of the book is comprised of twenty-four chapters about the state-of-the-art in interactive rendering, and the second half is devoted to general purpose computation on graphics processors (GPGPU)—the first book covering this topic.

Along the way, I also wrote a big textbook about rendering, Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation with Greg Humphreys. A sample chapter (on sampling and reconstruction) is available from the book's website. So far, the book has been used in advanced rendering courses at more than ten universities. A second edition of the book will be released in July of this year.

In spring of 2003, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to teach cs348b, the image synthesis class at Stanford. The excellent results from the rendering competition at the end of the course are online as well.

Finally, one of my greatest accomplishments yet may well be my decisive victory in the first annual Fantasy Graphics League.

: images :

: pieces of software :

• Poisson disk sampling patterns with dart throwing .cpp
• Texture filtering (notably, elliptical weighted average) .h, .cpp
• Worley's cellular noise function .cpp
• Skin shader based on Hanrahan-Krueger model .sl
• Make RenderMan dump out the grids it creates .c

: output :

: books :

Matt Pharr and Greg Humphreys, Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation, Morgan Kaufmann, July 2004. Comprehensive coverage of physically based rendering, including ray tracing, Monte Carlo integration, advanced light transport algorithms, and practical methods for anti-aliasing in rendering. (book's website)
Matt Pharr, ed., GPU Gems 2: Programming Techniques for High-Performance Graphics and General Purpose Computation, Addison-Wesley, March 2005. Forty eight chapters written by experts in the field, spanning advanced techniques for graphics programming on GPUs to programming techniques and case studies of general purpose computation on GPUs. (book's website) .

: dissertation :

• Matt Pharr, Monte Carlo Solution of Scattering Equations for Computer Graphics, Ph. D. Dissertation, Stanford University, June 2005

: papers :

• Matt Pharr and Pat Hanrahan, Geometry Caching for Ray-Tracing Displacement Maps, Proc. 1996 Eurographics Workshop on Rendering
• Matt Pharr, Craig Kolb, Reid Gershbein, and Pat Hanrahan, Rendering Complex Scenes with Memory-Coherent Ray Tracing, Proc. SIGGRAPH 1997
• Oliver Deussen, Pat Hanrahan, Bernd Lintermann, Radomir Mech, Matt Pharr, and Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, Realistic Modeling and Rendering of Plant Ecosystems, Proc. SIGGRAPH 1998
• Matt Pharr and Pat Hanrahan, Monte Carlo Evaluation of Non-Linear Scattering Equations for Subsurface Reflection, Proc. SIGGRAPH 2000

: book chapters :

• Ambient Occlusion, in GPU Gems (with Simon Green)
• Fast Filter Width Estimates with Texture Maps, in GPU Gems
• An Introduction to Shader Interfaces, in GPU Gems
• Options Pricing on the GPU, in GPU Gems 2 (with Craig Kolb)

: notes / whitepapers :

• Advanced RenderMan SIGGRAPH 2001 course, Light/Surface Interactions
• Monte Carlo Ray Tracing SIGGRAPH 2001 course, Metropolis Sampling and Sampling Scattering Equations.
• Advanced RenderMan SIGGRAPH 2002 course, Layered Media for Surface Shaders
• Monte Carlo Ray Tracing SIGGRAPH 2003 course, Metropolis Sampling
• Monte Carlo Ray Tracing SIGGRAPH 2004 course, Metropolis Sampling
• Matt Pharr, Aaron Lefohn, Craig Kolb, Paul Lalonde, Tim Foley, and Geoff Berry, Programmable Graphics - The Future of Interactive Rendering, Neoptica Technical Report, March 2007.

: movie credits :

• A Bug's Life: Rendering Software Engineer
• Toy Story 2: Rendering Software Engineer

: selected talks :

• Beyond Data Parallel: Advanced Rendering on Larrabee, SIGGRAPH 2008 course "Beyond Programmable Shading".
• Interactive Rendering In The Post-GPU Era, Keynote at the 2006 Eurographics/SIGGRAPH Conference on Graphics Hardware, September 2006.
• The Quiet Revolution in Interactive Rendering, UC Davis, guest lecture in EEC 227, Graphics Architecture, Winter 2006.
• The Quiet Revolution in Interactive Rendering, Pixar, December 13 2005.
• The Quiet Revolution in Interactive Rendering, Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium, November 9 2005.
• The Cg Language and Modern Graphics Architectures, UIUC Computer Science Colloquium, March 2003.
• Challenges in High-Quality Interactive Rendering, UC Davis, guest lecture in EEC 227, Graphics Architecture, June 2, 2003.
• Monte Carlo Evaluation of Non-Linear Scattering Equations for Subsurface Reflection, Monte Carlo and Quasi-Monte Carlo Methods Conference, Hong Kong, November 28, 2000.
• Rendering Natural Scenes with Generalized Object Instancing, Cornell Workshop on Rendering, Perception, and Measurement, April 8, 1998.