A heterogeneous system based on GPU and multi-core CPU for real-time fluid and rigid body simulation

Abstract

Computational fluid dynamics in simulation has become an important field not only for physics and engineering areas but also for simulation, computer graphics, virtual reality and even video game development. Many efficient models have been developed over the years, but when many contact interactions must be processed, most models present difficulties or cannot achieve real-time results when executed. The advent of parallel computing has enabled the development of many strategies for accelerating the simulations. Our work proposes a new system which uses some successful algorithms already proposed, as well as a data structure organisation based on a heterogeneous architecture using CPUs and GPUs, in order to process the simulation of the interaction of fluids and rigid bodies. This successfully results in a two-way interaction between them and their surrounding objects. As far as we know, this is the first work that presents a computational collaborative environment which makes use of two different paradigms of hardware architecture for this specific kind of problem. Since our method achieves real-time results, it is suitable for virtual reality, simulation and video game fluid simulation problems.

Keywords:

• GPU computing
• GPU-CPU load balancing
• real-time simulation
• smoothed particle hydrodynamics
• computational fluid dynamics

Acknowledgements

The first author is thankful to CAPES for the financial support. Esteban Clua is thankful to FAPERJ for the financial support. Paulo Pagliosa is thankful to FUNDECT for the financial support. The authors also thank all anonymous reviewers who helped us to improve the quality of this paper with their valuable comments.