An fast simulation tool for fluid animation in VR application based on GPUs

Abstract

Realistic and real-time simulation of fluid animation is widely used to the application of virtual reality(VR) such as VR game, special effect in film, augmented reality (AR) and so on. However, fast simulation of complex fluid animation problem such as free interaction surface and high impact requires a large number of both physical computations and time steps. It in turn leads to high computational cost. In order to improve the problem, we design a fast tool to accelerate and simulate fluid animation using multi-node graphics processing units clusters. In this paper, we present a fluid animation model tool for VR application based on multi-GPU cluster. The model method of position-based fluid (PBF) is implemented on our tool, and some strategies for GPUs optimizations are applied to parallel system based on the character of hardware. We first present an efficient data structure for speeding up memory access. Then, an optimized parallel framework is designed to get higher performance. We adjust the size of grid sptial index, reducing the access and thread synchronization during the neighborhood search, which greatly improve the efficiency on GPU. The key work of extending the PBF method from single GPU to GPU clusters, a spatial decomposition strategy is presented based on Orthogonal Recursive Bisection(ORB) model. Finally, an effective VR tool for real-time fluid animation modeling on the GPUs cluster is designed which can create various vivid animation. The performance and efficiency of our method are demonstrated using multiple VR scenes.