Title
Neighborhood grid: A novel data structure for fluids animation with GPU computing.
Abstract
This paper introduces a novel and efficient data structure, called neighborhood grid, capable of supporting large number of particle based elements on GPUs (graphics processing units), and is used for optimizing fluid animation with the use of GPU computing. The presented fluid simulation approach is based on SPH (smoothed particle hydrodynamics) and uses a unique algorithm for the neighborhood gathering. The brute force approach to neighborhood gathering of n particles has complexity O(n2), since it involves proximity queries of all pairs of fluid particles in order to compute the relevant mutual interactions. Usually, the algorithm is optimized by using spatial data structures which subdivide the environment in cells and then classify the particles among the cells based on their position, which is not efficient when a large number of particles are grouped in the same cell. Instead of using such approach, this work presents a novel and efficient data structure that maintains the particles into another form of proximity data structure, called neighborhood grid. In this structure, each cell contains only one particle and does not directly represent a discrete spatial subdivision. The neighborhood grid does process an approximate spatial neighborhood of the particles, yielding promising results for real time fluid animation, with results that goes up to 9 times speedup, when compared to traditional GPU approaches, and up to 100 times when compared against CPU implementations.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1016/j.jpdc.2014.10.009
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Fluid animation,Real-time simulation,GPU computing,GPGPU,Data structure,Fluid simulation
Journal
75
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0743-7315
3
0.47
References 
Authors
17
6