Question about Bottom-up traversal used in LBVH and TRBVH

[shocker_0x15]

Thanks sriravic, MohamedSakr.

Let me confirm to determine whether my understand about the atomic is right or not.

If 2 threads enter the while loop at the same time, that is, execute the atomic_inc(), is there a case that each returned value is 0? (The initial value of counters are 0.)
I think the counter value after 2 threads execute the atomic will be 2 because this is atomic operation.
However I'm not sure about the return value.
If it is true, the occurrence of the race condition seems natural.

Thanks.

[MohamedSakr]

Thanks sriravic, MohamedSakr.

Let me confirm to determine whether my understand about the atomic is right or not.

If 2 threads enter the while loop at the same time, that is, execute the atomic_inc(), is there a case that each returned value is 0? (The initial value of counters are 0.)
I think the counter value after 2 threads execute the atomic will be 2 because this is atomic operation.
However I'm not sure about the return value.
If it is true, the occurrence of the race condition seems natural.

first thread will run, atomic returns 0, which is while(false) , so first thread do nothing at all
second thread will run, atomic returns 1, which is while(true) , so second thread will do what you expect from the first thread
third thread will run, atomic returns 2, which is while(false) , so third thread will do nothing at all

[sriravic]

Hi

The hardware guarantees that increments will happen in atomic fashion as in serially and hence the return values would be unique (the function would not return till the increment happens). However I feel that the while loop condition is not a guarantee to prevent race condition as you will be having thousands of threads in flight with each thread in different code stages and hence would not have written their corresponding bounding boxes or parent bounding boxes(union). It would be totally a an undetermined operation. I guess that must be the reason why you are not able to get consistent results during rendering.

[shocker_0x15]

Thanks.

first thread will run, atomic returns 0, which is while(false) , so first thread do nothing at all
second thread will run, atomic returns 1, which is while(true) , so second thread will do what you expect from the first thread
third thread will run, atomic returns 2, which is while(false) , so third thread will do nothing at all

The hardware guarantees that increments will happen in atomic fashion as in serially and hence the return values would be unique (the function would not return till the increment happens).

My understanding seems not wrong.
The third thread will never come because this is a Binary Radix Tree and each thread starts from unique leaf.

I'm interested in how the author of the papar implements this.

[shocker_0x15]

I have maybe succeeded to resolve this issue.
I guess that the atomic operation and using it in the while condition is not a problem.
The cause seems to be a "cache". Writing an AABB to global memory is cached, so in case another thread tries to read the written data, there is no consistency.
Therefore, I added "volatile" qualifier to the AABB memory object. it became not to be cached and now I get a consistent result.

Thanks.