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About

Pierre-André Mudry

Pierre-André Mudry is head of Computer Science and Communication degree programme and a professor at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland (HES-SO Valais-Wallis) in Sion, where he teaches and conducts research in the Systems Engineering department.

His work sits at the intersection of embedded systems, digital hardware design, and applied machine learning. He has a particular interest in bridging the gap between algorithm and silicon — from high-level language design for constrained devices through to FPGA implementation and IoT deployment. Recent work has explored edge inference, non-invasive flow metering with neural networks, and anomaly detection on resource-limited hardware.

Research interests

  • Embedded systems and processor architectures
  • FPGA design and hardware/software co-design
  • Internet of Things and edge computing
  • Applied machine learning on constrained devices
  • High-performance computing and GPU programming

About this project

RayON started as a clean-room reimplementation of the Ray Tracing in One Weekend series — a personal exercise to understand the mechanics of stochastic light transport from first principles. It grew into a full-featured interactive path tracer used as an educational resource in the CS302 High-Performance Computing course for the ISC bachelor programme at HES-SO Valais.

The project demonstrates:

  • How the same scene description can drive both a readable CPU implementation and a massively parallel CUDA kernel without duplicating logic.
  • Progressive sample accumulation and interactive camera control at real-time frame rates on modern GPUs.
  • Physically-based materials (Lambertian diffuse, rough mirror microfacet, dielectric glass, emissive lights) implemented consistently on both CPU and GPU.

The source code is published under the AGPL v3 licence and is intended as a learning resource as much as a working renderer.