Pierce: GPU Ray Tracing for Spatial Joins over Complex 3D Data

Many emerging applications, from computational biology to digital twins and urban planning, rely heavily on three-dimensional spatial joins over polyhedral meshes. These joins comprise computationally-intensive triangle--triangle intersection tests that pairwise compare the faces of polyhedral meshes. Since each mesh may contain thousands of faces, the resulting cost challenges the responsiveness of spatial data management techniques. Existing techniques follow the filter-and-refine paradigm, accelerating either the filtering step through indexing or the refinement step through progressive mesh compression combined with GPU parallelization of triangle--triangle tests. However, the former neglects the high cost of intra-geometry refinements, whereas the latter lowers this cost but still rel