Constrained neighbor lists for SPH-based fluid simulations

Neighbor search dominates the cost and the memory footprint of an SPH simulation, and the usual way to size the neighbor list is to guess generously and hope. This paper instead enforces a user-defined maximum neighborhood size directly, using a predictive-corrective scheme that locally adjusts particle support radii — which makes memory consumption a guarantee rather than a hope, and lets a single GPU hold substantially more particles.

(Winchenbach et al., 2016)

Presented at SCA 2016 in Zurich, Switzerland.

References

2016

Constrained Neighbor Lists for SPH-based Fluid Simulations

Rene Winchenbach, Hendrik Hochstetter, and Andreas Kolb

In Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, Zurich, Switzerland, July 11-13, 2016, 2016

Abs DOI Bib

In this paper we present a new approach to create neighbor lists with strict memory bounds for incompressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations. Our proposed approach is based on a novel efficient predictive-corrective algorithm that locally adjusts particle support radii in order to yield neighborhoods of a user-defined maximum size. Due to the improved estimation of the initial support radius, our algorithm is able to efficiently calculate neighborhoods in a single iteration in almost any situation. We compare our neighbor list algorithm to previous approaches and show that our proposed approach can handle larger particle numbers on a single GPU due to its strict guarantees and is able to simulate more particles in real time due to its benefits in regard to performance. Additionally we demonstrate the versatility and stability of our approach in several different scenarios, for example multi-scale simulations and with different kernel functions.
@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/sca/WinchenbachHK16, author = {Winchenbach, Rene and Hochstetter, Hendrik and Kolb, Andreas}, title = {Constrained Neighbor Lists for {SPH}-based Fluid Simulations}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, Zurich, Switzerland, July 11-13, 2016}, pages = {49--56}, publisher = {Eurographics Association / {ACM}}, year = {2016}, doi = {10.2312/sca.20161222}, url = {https://doi.org/10.2312/sca.20161222}, }