Exposing Abstraction-Level Interactions with a Parallel Ray Tracer

For students of any Computer Engineering program, attaining an integrated vision of the different abstraction levels is paramount to fully understand and exploit a computer system, especially when tough topics such as parallelism, concurrency, consistency, or atomicity are involved at the hardware-software frontiers. However, the structure of typical engineering programs leads to the creation of self-contained courses, where a single level of abstraction is studied and the overall picture is lost. This paper provides a practical approach to show actual interactions between abstraction levels. This is achieved by implementing multiple components of a parallel ray tracer from the algorithmic level of the tracer to the atomic instructions required to guarantee atomicity. The students implement the full project throughout laboratories of different courses. Each lab focuses on a single abstraction level, but shows students the interactions with the rest of the levels. In addition, the hardware and software requirements of the approach are introduced, leading to the conclusion that Raspberry Pi is a suitable single-board computer for this project. Finally, this work also includes a preliminary assessment study of the proposed approach through the analysis of pre/post surveys filled out by the students.