Particle-Based Fluid Simulation on the GPU

Kyle Hegeman, Nathan A. Carr, Gavin S. P. Miller

Abstract: Large scale particle-based fluid simulation is important to both the scientific and computer graphics communities. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of implementing smoothed particle hydrodynamics on the streaming architecture of a GPU. A dynamic quadtree structure is proposed to accelerate the computation of inter-particle forces. Our method readily extends to higher dimensions without undue increase in memory or computation costs. We show that a GPU implementation runs nearly an order of magnitude faster than our CPU version for large problem sizes.