  Modern GPUs come with dedicated hardware to perform ray/triangle
intersections and bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) traversal. While the primary
use case for this hardware is photorealistic 3D computer graphics, with careful
algorithm design scientists can also use this special-purpose hardware to
accelerate general-purpose computations such as point containment queries. This
article explains the principles behind these techniques and their application
to vector field visualization of large simulation data using particle tracing.
