Will Usher
Scientific Visualization Engineer
Luminary Cloud
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About Me
I'm a Scientific Visualization Engineer at Luminary Cloud, where I work on a mix of challenging problems in computer graphics, spatial data processing, parallel computing, and rendering large data sets in the browser. Previously, I was a Ray Tracing Software Engineer at Intel working on the oneAPI Rendering Toolkit focusing on XPU ray tracing, distributed rendering, and scientific visualization within OSPRay. In my spare time, I work on XPU ray tracing, GPU/WebGPU scientific visualization and rendering, and other projects involving massive scientific data visualization across computing platforms from HPC clusters to the web browser. I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at the University of Utah, advised by Valerio Pascucci. Before joining the Ph.D. program at Utah I obtained a B.S. in physics with a minor in computer science at the University of California, Riverside. My research interests cover a range of areas in scientific visualization and computer graphics including: distributed rendering, virtual reality, in situ visualization and ray tracing.Selected Publications
Approximate Puzzlepiece Compositing
Xuan Huang, Will Usher, Valerio Pascucci. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (To Appear), 2025.
Enabling Fast and Accurate Crowdsourced Annotation for Elevation-Aware Flood Extent Mapping
Landon Dyken, Saugat Adhikari, Pravin Poudel, Steve Petruzza, Da Yan, Will Usher, Sidharth Kumar. IEEE Pacific Visualization Conference (To Appear), 2025.
Honorable Mention
Interactive Isosurface Visualization in Memory Constrained Environments Using Deep Learning and Speculative Raycasting
Landon Dyken, Will Usher, Sidharth Kumar. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2024.
Speculative Progressive Raycasting for Memory Constrained Isosurface Visualization of Massive Volumes
Will Usher, Landon Dyken, Sidharth Kumar. IEEE Symposium on Large Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV), 2023.
Best Paper
Ray Tracing Spherical Harmonics Glyphs
Christoph Peters, Tark Patel, Will Usher, and Chris R. Johnson. International Symposium on Vision, Modeling and Visualization (VMV), 2023.
Honorable Mention
GraphWaGu: GPU Powered Large Scale Graph Layout Computation and Rendering for the Web
Landon Dyken, Pravin Poudel, Will Usher, Steve Petruzza, Jake Y. Chen, Sidharth Kumar. Eurographics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization, 2022.
Design and Evaluation of a GPU Streaming Framework for Visualizing Time-Varying AMR Data
Stefan Zellmann, Ingo Wald, Alper Sahistan, Matthias Hellmann, Will Usher. Eurographics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization, 2022.
Adaptive Spatially Aware I/O for Multiresolution Particle Data Layouts
Will Usher, Xuan Huang, Steve Petruzza, Sidharth Kumar, Stuart R. Slattery, Sam T. Reeve, Feng Wang, Chris R. Johnson, and Valerio Pascucci. IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), 2021.
Adaptive Multiresolution Techniques for I/O, Data Layout, and Visualization of Massive Simulations
Will Usher. PhD Dissertation, University of Utah, 2021.
Improving the Usability of Virtual Reality Neuron Tracing with Topological Element
Torin McDonald, Will Usher, Nate Morrical, Attila Gyulassy, Steve Petruzza, Frederick Federer, Alessandra Angelucci, and Valerio Pascucci. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2021.
Ray Tracing Structured AMR Data Using ExaBricks
Ingo Wald, Stefan Zellmann, Will Usher, Nate Morrical, Ulrich Lang, and Valerio Pascucci. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2021.
Accelerating Unstructured Mesh Point Location with RT Cores
Nate Morrical, Ingo Wald, Will Usher, Valerio Pascucci. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2020.
Interactive Visualization of Terascale Data in the Browser: Fact or Fiction?
Will Usher and Valerio Pascucci. IEEE Symposium on Large Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV), 2020.
Honorable Mention
Using Hardware Ray Transforms to Accelerate Ray/Primitive Intersections for Long, Thin Primitive Types
Ingo Wald, Nate Morrical, Stefan Zellmann, Lei Ma, Will Usher, Tiejun Huang, Valerio Pascucci. Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (Proceedings of High Performance Graphics), 2020.
CPU Ray Tracing of Tree-Based Adaptive Mesh Refinement Data
Feng Wang, Nathan Marshak, Will Usher, Carsten Burstedde, Aaron Knoll, Timo Heister, and Chris R. Johnson. Computer Graphics Forum, 2020.
Efficient Space Skipping and Adaptive Sampling of Unstructured Volumes Using Hardware Accelerated Ray Tracing
Nate Morrical, Will Usher, Ingo Wald and Valerio Pascucci. IEEE VIS Short Papers, 2019.
Scalable Ray Tracing Using the Distributed FrameBuffer
Will Usher, Ingo Wald, Jefferson Amstutz, Johannes Günther, Carson Brownlee, and Valerio Pascucci. Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of EuroVis), 2019.
RTX Beyond Ray Tracing: Exploring the Use of Hardware Ray Tracing Cores for Tet-Mesh Point Location
Ingo Wald, Will Usher, Nate Morrical, Laura Lediaev, and Valerio Pascucci. High Performance Graphics Short Papers, 2019.
CPU Isosurface Ray Tracing of Adaptive Mesh Refinement Data
Feng Wang, Ingo Wald, Qi Wu, Will Usher and Chris R. Johnson. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2019.
A Virtual Reality Visualization Tool for Neuron Tracing
Will Usher, Pavol Klacansky, Frederick Federer, Peer-Timo Bremer, Aaron Knoll, Jeff Yarch, Alessandra Angelucci, and Valerio Pascucci. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2018.