GPUerror – propagation of error on a GPU revealing colorful structure in volume

By serendipity this visual computing experiment led to a visualization of colorful structures that evolve from the parallel propagation of errors on a graphics processing unit (GPU). We wanted to transfer color values in subsequent volume slices using an OpenCL kernel. Due to concurrent memory access this transfer operation was erroneous and produced interesting visual patterns in a point-based visualization. Meanwhile we fixed this “error” with another kernel but we wanted to share the initial results as a piece of visual computing art. The visual patterns reveal the structure of block-wise kernel execution on the GPU. Further information on this experiment and code snippets (PDF).