I'm pleased to announce the beta release of Accelerad,
a free GPU-accelerated suite of programs for lighting and daylighting
analysis and visualization.

Accelerad uses physically-based backward ray tracing algorithms inspired by
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory?s popular Radiance software suite by
Greg Ward. These algorithms are accelerated up to twenty times faster using
a ray tracing engine built for the graphics processor unit (GPU). The
acceleration factor scales with the number of available GPUs and is
expected to increase on new generations of hardware. In order to allow for
smooth adoption among Radiance users and software developers, Accelerad
maintains compatibility with Radiance scene and output file formats and
currently uses a subset of Radiance?s material modifiers and command-line
arguments.

For more information and to receive a copy of the beta release, visit
http://mit.edu/sustainabledesignlab/projects/Accelerad/.

Nathaniel Jones
PhD student
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
http://nljones.scripts.mit.edu/