Jens Schneider, Polina Kondratieva, Jens Krüger, and Rüdiger Westermann from TU Munich have won the 2005 IEEE Visualization Contest with their work “All you need is particles!” Check out the video of their results; it’s very interesting.
(http://wwwcg.in.tum.de/Research/Projects/VisContest05)

As simulation and rendering capabilities continue to increase, volumetric effects like smoke, fire or explosions will be frequently encountered in computer games and virtual environments. This paper presents techniques for the visual simulation and rendering of such effects that keep up with the demands for frame rates imposed by such environments. This is achieved by leveraging functionality on recent graphics programming units (GPUs) in combination with a novel approach to model non physics-based, yet realistic variations in flow fields. The paper shows how to use this mechanism for simulating effects. Physics-based simulation is performed on 2D proxy geometries, and simulation results are extruded to 3D using particle or texture based approaches. (http://wwwcg.in.tum.de/Research/data/Publications/eg05.pdf)

This paper presents a particle system for interactive visualization of steady 3D flow fields on uniform grids. For large particle systems, particle integration needs to be accelerated and the transfer of particle data to the GPU must be avoided. To fulfill these requirements, this paper exploits features of recent graphics accelerators to advect particles in the graphics processing unit (GPU), saving particle positions in graphics memory, and then sending these positions through the GPU again to obtain images in the frame buffer. (http://wwwcg.in.tum.de/Research/data/Publications/tvcg05.pdf)

This VMV 2004 paper by De Chiara et al. presents a massive simulation of a behavioral model using graphics hardware. A well-known flocking model is implemented on the GPU. The model is capable of managing large aggregate motion of birds in a virtual environment including avoidance of both static and dynamic obstacles. The effectiveness of the GPU implementation is demonstrated with a comparison to a CPU implementation. (Massive Simulation using GPU of a distributed behavioral model of a flock with obstacle avoidance. Rosario De Chiara, Ugo Erra, Vittorio Scarano, Maurizio Tatafiore. In Proceedings of 9th Internation Fall Workshop VISION, MODELLING, AND VISUALIZATION 2004.)

This paper by Chu and Tai at HKUST presents a physically-based method for simulating ink dispersion in absorbent paper for art creation purposes. The ink flow model is based on the lattice Boltzmann equation and is designed to work on the GPU efficiently. (MoXi: Real-Time Ink Dispersion in Absorbent Paper. Nelson S.-H. Chu and Chiew-Lan Tai. To appear in ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2005 issue), August 2005)

A free open-source library for grid-based, Navier-Stokes fluid simulation on the GPU has been released. The code compiles under the DirectX 9.0 SDK (Summer 2003 Update) and is structured for easy integration into existing DirectX applications (for example, single methods to add fluid emitters and to advance the simulation, etc). This code has been used in the computer game Ensign Expendable developed by Strange Bunny. (Open-Source Direct3D Fluid Simulation Library.)

This Pacific Graphics 2004 paper by Youquan Liu et al. presents a way to process complex boundary conditions when simulating fluid flow using the Navier-Stokes Equations on the GPU. After voxelizing the 3D geometry scene, this technique computes a “modification factor texture” and an offset texture in “flat 3D” form to delineate boundary conditions needed to handle the internal obstacles, and in this way it takes advantage of the parallelism of GPU to accelerate the whole computation. (“Real-Time 3D Fluid Simulation on GPU with Complex Obstacles”, Youquan Liu, Xuehui Liu and Enhua Wu, In Proceedings of Pacific Graphics 2004, pages 247-256,October 2004.)

This paper by Fan et. al. at Stony Brook University presents the use of a cluster of commodity GPUs for high performance scientific computing. As an example application, they have developed a parallel flow simulation using the lattice Boltzmann model (LBM) on a GPU cluster and have simulated the dispersion of airborne contaminants in the Times Square area of New York City. Using 30 GPU nodes, their simulation can compute a 480 x 400 x 80 LBM in 0.31 second/step, a speed which is 4.6 times faster than that of their previous CPU cluster implementation. Besides the LBM, the paper also discusses other potential applications of the GPU cluster, such as cellular automata, PDE solvers, and FEM. (Zhe Fan, Feng Qiu, Arie Kaufman, Suzanne Yoakum-Stover, GPU Cluster for High Performance Computing, To Appear in Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE SuperComputing 2004 (SC’04), November, 2004)

This white paper by Batty, Wiebe, and Houston of Frantic Films presents a GPU-based preconditioned conjugate gradient solver used in a production-quality fluid simulator. The paper shows a speedup of 50% over an equivalent CPU-based version, even though it is impossible to implement the optimal preconditioner on the current NVIDIA GPU architecture. (High Performance Production-Quality Fluid Simulation via NVIDIA’s Quadro FX. Chris Batty, Mark Wiebe, and Ben Houston. Frantic Films.)

This dissertation by Mark Harris of UNC Chapel Hill contains significant GPGPU-related content, including physically-based simulation of fluids, clouds, and chemical reaction diffusion on GPUs. The material is much expanded from several papers summarizing various components of the work, most of which have been reported on this site previously. Also included in the dissertation is a history of general-purpose computation on graphics hardware. (Real-Time Cloud Simulation and Rendering. Mark J. Harris. Ph.D. Dissertation. UNC Technical Report #TR03-040. September, 2003.)