The 2017 NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference (NVIDIA GTC) kicked off May 8 with a talk by Rama Hoetzlein, NVIDIA lead architect for GVDB Voxels. NVIDIA GDVB Voxels is a new open-source software development kit for generic representation, computation, and rendering of voxel-based data.

“GVDB Voxels greatly accelerates new applications in simulation engineering, and redefines production design,” says Hoetzlein.

GVDB Voxels currently runs on CUDA hardware, from the Jetson TX1/2 platform (256 cores) to Quadro Pascal (3992 cores) and Tesla K80 (4992 cores). GVDB Voxels delivers substantial performance improvement on NVIDIA Pascal architecture over Maxwell in rendering and computation.

GVDB Voxels is designed for those who want to build their own applications and is meant for developers.

“Part of our goal is to enable experimentation, empowering the open source maker community,” says Hoetzlein.

In support of this goal, NVIDIA placed the entire SDK on GitHub and also created a Windows installer. Further support and interaction is available through a forum. The entire SDK is open source, Hoetzlein notes.

This first release of GVDB Voxels allows for fast and efficient implementation on single GPUs. Later releases may support distributed computing. NVIDIA has partnered with HP to couple GVDB Voxels with 3D printer technology, which will be demonstrated starting Tuesday at the conference You can learn more here.