GPU-based particle simulation with inter-collisions

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new GPU-based particle system. The simulation runs entirely on the GPU, thus eliminating data transfer between CPU and GPU. The proposed system is able to simulate particles in confined environments, including support for inter-particle collisions, constraints, and particle–obstacle collisions. On modern graphics cards, the system simulates up to one million particles at interactive rate. We also propose a flexible approach for modeling the obstacles that define the environment, allowing the creation of different scenes without relying on shader re-coding. A set of computational experiments demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed system.