RenderCore – a new WebGPU-based rendering engine for ROOT-EVE

¹ UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA 92093
² MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA, 02139
³ GSI, Darmstadt, Germany 64291
⁴ University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia 1000
⁵ KAUST, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia, 23955

^* e-mail: mtadel@ucsd.edu

Published online: 6 May 2024

Abstract

ROOT-Eve (REve), the new generation of the ROOT event-display module, uses a web server-client model to guarantee exact data translation from the experiments’ data analysis frameworks to users’ browsers. Data is then displayed in various views, including high-precision 2D and 3D graphics views, currently driven by THREE.js rendering engine based on WebGL technology. RenderCore, a computer graphics research-oriented rendering engine, has been integrated into REve to optimize rendering performance and enable the use of state-of-the-art techniques for object highlighting and object selection. It also allowed for the implementation of optimized instanced rendering through the usage of custom shaders and rendering pipeline modifications. To further the impact of this investment and ensure the long-term viability of REve, RenderCore is being refactored on top of WebGPU, the next-generation GPU interface for browsers that supports compute shaders, storage textures and introduces significant improvements in GPU utilization. This has led to optimization of in-terchange data formats, decreased server-client traffic, and improved offloading of data visualization algorithms to the GPU. FireworksWeb, a physics analysis-oriented event display of the CMS experiment, is used to demonstrate the results, focusing on high-granularity calorimeters and targeting high data-volume events of heavy-ion collisions and High-Luminosity LHC. The next steps and directions are also discussed.