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- Creators: Barrett, The Honors College
Description
Radiometric dating estimates the age of rocks by comparing the concentration of a decaying radioactive isotope to the concentrations of the decay byproducts. Radiometric dating has been instrumental in the calculation of the Earth's age, the Moon's age, and the age of our solar system. Geochronologists in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at ASU use radiometric dating extensively in their research, and have very specific procedures, hardware, and software to perform the dating calculations. Researchers use lasers to drill small holes, or ablations, in rock faces, collect the masses of various isotopes using a mass spectrometer, and scan the pit with an interferometer, which records the z heights of the pit on an x-y grid. This scan is then processed by custom-made software to determine the volume of the pit, which then is used along with the isotope masses and known decay rates to determine the age of the rock. My research has been focused on improving this volume calculation through computational geometry methods of surface reconstruction. During the process, I created an web application that reads interferometer scans, reconstructs a surface from those scans with Poisson reconstruction, renders the surface in the browser, and calculates the volume of the pit based on parameters provided by the researcher. The scans are stored in a central cloud datastore for future analysis, allowing the researchers in the geochronology community to collaborate together on scans from various rocks in their individual labs. The result of the project has been a complete and functioning application that is accessible to any researcher and reproducible from any computer. The 3D representation of the scan data allows researchers to easily understand the topology of the pit ablation and determine early on whether the measurements of the interferometer are trustworthy for the particular ablation. The volume calculation by the new software also reduces the variability in the volume calculation, which hopefully indicates the process is removing noise from the scan data and performing volume calculations on a more realistic representation of the actual ablation. In the future, this research will be used as the groundwork for more robust testing and closer approximations through implementation of different reconstruction algorithms. As the project grows and becomes more usable, hopefully there will be adoption in the community and it will become a reproducible standard for geochronologists performing radiometric dating.
ContributorsPruitt, Jacob Richard (Author) / Hodges, Kip (Thesis director) / Mercer, Cameron (Committee member) / van Soest, Matthijs (Committee member) / Department of Economics (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
The project, "The Emblems: OpenGL" is a 2D strategy game that incorporates Speech Recognition for control and OpenGL for computer graphics. Players control their own army by voice commands and try to eliminate the opponent's army. This report focuses on the 2D art and visual aspects of the project. There are different sprites for the player's army units and icons within the game. The game also has a grid for easy unit placement.
ContributorsHsia, Allen (Author) / Kobayashi, Yoshihiro (Thesis director) / Maciejewski, Ross (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
This paper compares two approaches to implementing the Marching Cubes algorithm, a method of extracting a polygonal mesh from a 3D scalar field. One possible application of this algorithm is as a procedural terrain generation technique for use in video game development. The Marching Cubes algorithm is an easily parallelizable task, and as such benefits greatly from being executed on the GPU. The reason that the algorithm is so well suited for parallelization is that it breaks the problem of mesh generation into a large group of similar sub-problems that can be solved completely independently.
ContributorsLord, William (Author) / Kobayashi, Yoshihiro (Thesis director) / Hansford, Dianne (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Computing and Informatics Program (Contributor)
Created2022-12
ContributorsLord, William (Author) / Kobayashi, Yoshihiro (Thesis director) / Hansford, Dianne (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2022-12
ContributorsLord, William (Author) / Kobayashi, Yoshihiro (Thesis director) / Hansford, Dianne (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2022-12
Description
Vulkan is a modern, low-level, and low-overhead graphics library that allows for the distribution of work across CPU cores using multithreading. This multithreading is possible due to the near full control of the GPU that Vulkan allows. The additional control makes it possible to send multiple instructions to the GPU at the same time. There are a variety of techniques that can be used with Vulkan to effectively improve performance while multithreading instructions to the GPU. One of the challenges of multithreading is the lack of modern-day GPU hardware to support it, which leads to the purpose of this paper, to explore the practicality of multithreading techniques with Vulkan in today’s current computing environment.
ContributorsWahl, Ryan (Author) / Hansford, Dianne (Thesis director) / Kobayashi, Yoshihiro (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2023-12