Please review my SOP

I am applying for Masters in Computer Science in US universities. I have somehow managed to write 2 pages of my statement of purpose, stating my motivation, experiences and future goals. Please let me know what you think about it.

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Statement of purpose


Enthralled by cinematic animation and visual effects in movies and video games since childhood, it was always my dream to venture into the exciting and burgeoning field of computer graphics.
I find the idea of simulating the real-world through computers challenging and exciting. No wonder, graphics was the main motivator for me to pursue the field of computer science as a major for undergraduate studies at Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. This gave me ample opportunity to learn the subtleties of software engineering and computer hardware architecture. Combined with self-acquired skills like knowledge of rendering API’s and graphics hardware architecture, the bachelors was very helpful for me in establishing a solid foundation. Apart from core rendering techniques and algorithms, my interests are piqued by related fields like character animation, physically based simulation, graphics architectures and parallel computing. I find these areas exciting and satisfying and they are a source of self-motivation for me.

My foray into the computer graphics world started as an intern at VizExperts supervised by Praveen Bhaniramka in my 2nd year as an undergraduate, which involved research work in real-time procedural vegetation rendering algorithm using programmable graphics hardware. This was a novel heterogeneous-computing based approach to generate 3D geometric data on graphics hardware built on a simplified model generated by CPU. This exposure helped me gain a lot of knowledge about basic rendering techniques, graphics APIs, scene-graphs and modern graphics architectures.

My interest in graphics technology in game engines motivated me to intern as a research student the Graphics Lab in University of Girona, Spain. I worked on a collaborated industrial project under Prof. Mateu Sbert that required developing a deferred shading based graphics renderer using OpenGL. I implemented an asset pipeline model using COLLADA schema. It used the hierarchical information in geometric models to render them efficiently using our scene-graph based engine. We also experimented with various illumination techniques and found that screen space ambient occlusion and shadow mapping using modern graphics hardware were the best choices for our engine. Our team was successful in creating an efficient and photo-realistic 3D renderer with our own custom asset pipeline.

My curiosity about parallel programming propelled me to take up a project related to parallel algorithms to gain more understanding on this relatively new but booming area. I worked on developing a deadlock detection algorithm which could do a quick run-time analysis of a program and output possible deadlocking scenarios among threads. This was the main thesis of my undergrad studies supervised by Prof. Purandar Bhaduri at IIT Guwahati. Getting to know the basics of parallel computing and its pitfalls like race conditions and deadlocks was completely different with sequential programming and it certainly was an intriguing experience for me.

Determined to gain in-depth knowledge about GPGPU and graphics architectures along with my desire to work on leading technology, I joined the office of AMD in Bangalore as a design engineer. I worked mainly on Open Computing Language which is a heterogeneous language targeted for parallel architectures. This involved porting parallel algorithms to modern graphics architectures using OpenCL, the goal was to efficiently use hardware resources and get a healthy speed-up compared to implementations written on CPU. With help of industry experts in GPGPU like Mike Houston and Ben Sander, I learned about compilers, code optimizations, low-level hardware optimizations such as cache coherency and register optimizations. With a thorough understanding of the language and hardware architecture, I was able to write one of the fastest Matrix-Multiplication application achieving 1.2 Tera-flops on a single GPU. Graphics being my main interest, I ported many rendering algorithms such as Volume Rendering and Fluid simulation which ran at interactive speeds even on low-end GPUs. I also did extensive benchmarking of AMD’s implementation of OpenCL by writing a benchmark suite which helped in improving its performance and mitigating the bottlenecks. I got an opportunity to present my work on performance optimizations at the PEMG-2010 summit held in Bangalore. There I also got an opportunity to talk to Mike Mantor, a fellow architect at AMD and an eminent personality in the GPU world. We discussed current evolution of GPUs and their future, it really was a great learning experience for me.

My short stint at VizExperts in the software design team found me working on a GIS 3D visualization application, which is an integrated software and hardware based custom solution for Indian Army. This system was designed to aid in visualising military based planning and allowed rendering of huge city-level based 3D data sets. I implemented ocean and cloudrendering system for the application.

I have always been fascinated by the mod-community on PC based games, which provides variety and extra replay value to the original game through custom modifications. When I heard about a team of developers working on a total-conversion mod using Valve’s Source engine named CSPromod, I was excited and willing to get on-board as this was an opportunity for me to work intimately with modern game engines and industry. It also was an opportunity to give something back to the Counter-Strike community as I’ve been a part of it since its inception. The aim of this project is to recreate the much beloved gameplay of original CS on to a newer game engine with improved graphics, physics and animations. I worked with game related subsystems such as networking code, weapon behaviour such as recoil and physics, character movement, camera system etc. The project has seen two widely admired releases after I joined the team and it is soon to be out of beta. This community based project has no pecuniary incentives and I’ve been working part-time on this project along with my regular job.

My future goal is to work with cutting edge technology in computer graphics which may find its application in interactive media like video games and films, scientific and medical visualization. This could mean either working with industry leaders or as a researcher in academia to contribute in developing novel, innovative, efficient software and hardware solutions which would ultimately bridge the gap between realism and computer generated worlds. My experience is diverse in academic and industrial projects and is well supplemented by a strong academic background in mathematics and programming. I secured a rank in the top 0.5% of the students appearing in IIT Joint Entrance Examination to gain admission to the most prestigious Computer Science programs in India. My self-motivation and ability to reason critically will help me tackle new and challenging problems with ease.

I believe that a Master's degree will offer me specialized knowledge, skill set and excellent exposure which will help me achieve the goals I set for myself at this juncture. I am fascinated by the extensive ongoing research at Univesity XXX in computer graphics and yearn to be able to work in its XXX Research group. There is a rich cornucopia of graphics based courses like XXX, XXX etc. There are many ongoing interesting research projects based on XXX, XXX and XXX under the supervision of eminent faculty like Prof. XXX, all contribute to making XXX a perfect place for me to pursue my graduate studies.