(Unterschrift Günther Voglsam) i Acknowledgements I want to thank Michael Wimmer at the Institute of Computergraphics and Algorithms for his support for the thesis, as well as the members of the VRVis Forschungs-GmbH for making this thesis happen in such a pleasant environment. At the VRVis I want to say special thanks to Robert F. Tobler, Michael Schwärzler and Christian Luksch for all their support and the numerous discussions we had.

We present a novel method for massively parallel hierarchical scene processing on the GPU, which is based on sequential decomposition of the given hierarchical algorithm into small functional blocks. The computation is organized using a specialized work pool in which different blocks of processing units solve different functional blocks. We present an application of the proposed approach to two methods used in ray tracing: construction of the bounding volume hierarchies and the recently introduced divideand-conquer ray tracing on the GPU. The results indicate that using our approach we achieve high utilization of the GPU even for complex hierarchical problems which pose

We present a novel method for massively parallel hierarchical scene processing on the GPU, which is based on sequential decomposition of the given hierarchical algorithm into small functional blocks. The computation is fully managed by the GPU using a specialized task pool which facilitates synchronization and communication of processing units. We present two applications of the proposed approach: construction of the bounding volume hierarchies and collision detection based on divide-and-conquer ray tracing. The results indicate that using our approach we achieve high utilization of the GPU even for complex hierarchical problems which pose a challenge for massive parallelization.