Parallel Simulation of Large-Scale Universal Particle Systems Using CUDA

Abstract

Particle systems' greatest advantage is well suited for modeling complex fuzzy phenomena, such as explosions, fountain, tornado and fireworks, etc. in 3D graphics. With the increasing requirements on the number of particles and particle-particle interactions, the computational complexity of simulation in particle systems has increased rapidly. Particle systems are traditionally implemented on a general-purpose CPU, and the computational complexity of particle systems limits the number of particles that can be computed at interactive rates. This paper focuses on real-time simulation of large-scale particle systems. We discuss optional integration algorithms based on CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) for both graphic and scientific simulation. The speed of particle systems has been greatly improved, with parallel-core GPUs working in tandem with multi-core CPUs. In order to provide a scalable and portable API library, the object-oriented programming method is adopted to encapsulate the functions of parallel particle system. Results show that our proposed APIs are user-friendly and the parallel implementations are significantly efficient.