Design and Implementation of Particle Systems for Meshfree Methods with High Performance

Abstract

Particle systems, commonly associated with computer graphics, animation, and video games, are an essential component in the implementation of numerical methods ranging from the meshfree methods for computational fluid dynamics and related applications (e.g., smoothed particle hydrodynamics, SPH) to minimization methods for arbitrary problems (e.g., particle swarm optimization, PSO). These methods are frequently embarrassingly parallel in nature, making them a natural fit for implementation on massively parallel computational hardware such as modern graphics processing units (GPUs). However, naive implementations fail to fully exploit the capabilities of this hardware. We present practical solutions to the challenges faced in the efficient parallel implementation of these particle systems, with a focus on performance, robustness, and flexibility. The techniques are illustrated through GPUSPH, the first implementation of SPH to run completely on GPU, and currently supporting multi-GPU clusters, uniform precision independent of domain size, and multiple SPH formulations.