AltDevConf Programming – Erwin Coumans

Programming Track. His talk: “Accelerating Game Physics for Heterogeneous CPUs & GPUs”.

Erwin Coumans is working on real-time physics simulation for film and game productions. After his study of computer science at Eindhoven University, he has been doing collision detection and rigid body physics simulation research for Guerrilla Games in the Netherlands, Havok in Ireland, Sony Computer Entertainment US R&D and now as principal engineer at AMD in California.

Erwin is the main author behind the open source Bullet Physics Library. This work is used by game companies such as Disney Interactive Studios and Rockstar Games and film studios such as Sony Pictures Imageworks, Dreamworks Animation and Digital Domain. He has presented at conferences such as the Game Developer Conference (GDC), SIGGRAPH, the Paris Master Classes and CEDEC.

At the #AltDevConf he will be discussing how to optimize a full rigid body pipeline for GPUs using OpenCL or DirectCompute kernels. This includes topics such as finding the potential overlapping pairs of objects, contact point generation and reduction and solving contact constraints on the GPU. It will also discuss some tools that can be used to debug and profile the GPU kernels. The full source code will become available at AltDevConf.org and remember to clear your schedule February 11th/12th to come join us!