444 research outputs found
GADGET: A code for collisionless and gasdynamical cosmological simulations
We describe the newly written code GADGET which is suitable both for
cosmological simulations of structure formation and for the simulation of
interacting galaxies. GADGET evolves self-gravitating collisionless fluids with
the traditional N-body approach, and a collisional gas by smoothed particle
hydrodynamics. Along with the serial version of the code, we discuss a parallel
version that has been designed to run on massively parallel supercomputers with
distributed memory. While both versions use a tree algorithm to compute
gravitational forces, the serial version of GADGET can optionally employ the
special-purpose hardware GRAPE instead of the tree. Periodic boundary
conditions are supported by means of an Ewald summation technique. The code
uses individual and adaptive timesteps for all particles, and it combines this
with a scheme for dynamic tree updates. Due to its Lagrangian nature, GADGET
thus allows a very large dynamic range to be bridged, both in space and time.
So far, GADGET has been successfully used to run simulations with up to 7.5e7
particles, including cosmological studies of large-scale structure formation,
high-resolution simulations of the formation of clusters of galaxies, as well
as workstation-sized problems of interacting galaxies. In this study, we detail
the numerical algorithms employed, and show various tests of the code. We
publically release both the serial and the massively parallel version of the
code.Comment: 32 pages, 14 figures, replaced to match published version in New
Astronomy. For download of the code, see
http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/gadget (new version 1.1 available
Coupling SPH and thermochemical models of planets: Methodology and example of a Mars-sized body
Giant impacts have been suggested to explain various characteristics of
terrestrial planets and their moons. However, so far in most models only the
immediate effects of the collisions have been considered, while the long-term
interior evolution of the impacted planets was not studied. Here we present a
new approach, combining 3-D shock physics collision calculations with 3-D
thermochemical interior evolution models. We apply the combined methods to a
demonstration example of a giant impact on a Mars-sized body, using typical
collisional parameters from previous studies. While the material parameters
(equation of state, rheology model) used in the impact simulations can have
some effect on the long-term evolution, we find that the impact angle is the
most crucial parameter for the resulting spatial distribution of the newly
formed crust. The results indicate that a dichotomous crustal pattern can form
after a head-on collision, while this is not the case when considering a more
likely grazing collision. Our results underline that end-to-end 3-D
calculations of the entire process are required to study in the future the
effects of large-scale impacts on the evolution of planetary interiors.Comment: 29 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in Icaru
Particle hydrodynamics with tessellation techniques
Lagrangian smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is a well-established
approach to model fluids in astrophysical problems, thanks to its geometric
flexibility and ability to automatically adjust the spatial resolution to the
clumping of matter. However, a number of recent studies have emphasized
inaccuracies of SPH in the treatment of fluid instabilities. The origin of
these numerical problems can be traced back to spurious surface effects across
contact discontinuities, and to SPH's inherent prevention of mixing at the
particle level. We here investigate a new fluid particle model where the
density estimate is carried out with the help of an auxiliary mesh constructed
as the Voronoi tessellation of the simulation particles instead of an adaptive
smoothing kernel. This Voronoi-based approach improves the ability of the
scheme to represent sharp contact discontinuities. We show that this eliminates
spurious surface tension effects present in SPH and that play a role in
suppressing certain fluid instabilities. We find that the new `Voronoi Particle
Hydrodynamics' described here produces comparable results than SPH in shocks,
and better ones in turbulent regimes of pure hydrodynamical simulations. We
also discuss formulations of the artificial viscosity needed in this scheme and
how judiciously chosen correction forces can be derived in order to maintain a
high degree of particle order and hence a regular Voronoi mesh. This is
especially helpful in simulating self-gravitating fluids with existing gravity
solvers used for N-body simulations.Comment: 26 pages, 24 figures, currentversion is accepted by MNRA
Modeling And Simulation Of Soft Bodies
As graphics and simulations become more realistic, techniques for approximating soft body objects, that is, non-solid objects such as liquids, gases, and cloth, are becoming increasingly common. The proposed generalized soft body method encompasses some specific cases of other existing models enabling simulation of a variety of soft body materials by parameter adjustment. This research presents a general method of soft body model and simulation in which parameters for body control, surface deformation, volume control, and gravitation, can be adjusted to simulate different types of soft bodies. In this method, the soft body mesh structure maintains configuration among surface points while fluid modeling deforms the details of the surface. To maintain volume, an internal pressure is approximated by simulated molecules within the soft body. Free fall motion of soft body is generated by gravitational field. Additionally, a constraint is specified based on the property of the soft body being modeled. There are several standard methods to control soft body volume. This work illustrates the simplicity of simulation by selecting a mass-spring system for the deformation of the connected points of a three-dimensional mesh, while an internal pressure force acts upon the surface triangles. To incorporate fluidity, smooth particles hydrodynamics (SPH) is applied where surface points are considered as free moving particles interacting with neighboring surface points within a SPH radius. Because SPH is computationally expensive, it requires an efficient method to determine neighboring surface points. Collision detection with soft bodies and other rigid body objects also requires such fast neighbor detection. To determine the neighboring surface point, Axis Aligned Bounding Box (AABB), Octree, and a partitioning and hashing schemes iv have been investigated and the result shows that the partitioning and hashing scheme provides the best frame rate. Thus a fast partitioning and hashing scheme is used in this research to reduce both computational time and the memory requirements. The proposed soft body model aims to be applied in several types of soft body application depending on the specific types of soft body deformation. The work presented in this dissertation details experiments with a variety of visually appealing fluid-like surfaces and organic materials animated at interactive speeds. The algorithm is also used to implement animated space-blob creatures in the Galactic Arms Race video game and a human lung simulation, demonstrating the effectiveness of the algorithm in both an actual video game engine and a medical application. The simulation results show that the general model of the soft body can be applied to several applications by adjusting the soft body parameters according to the appearance results
Deformation embedding for point-based elastoplastic simulation
pre-printWe present a straightforward, easy-to-implement, point-based approach for animating elastoplastic materials. The core idea of our approach is the introduction of embedded space-the least-squares best fit of the material's rest state into three dimensions. Nearest neighbor queries in the embedded space efficiently update particle neighborhoods to account for plastic flow. These queries are simpler and more efficient than remeshing strategies employed in mesh-based finite element methods.We also introduce a new estimate for the volume of a particle, allowing particle masses to vary spatially and temporally with fixed density. Our approach can handle simultaneous extreme elastic and plastic deformations. We demonstrate our approach on a variety of examples that exhibit a wide range of material behaviors
Working With Incremental Spatial Data During Parallel (GPU) Computation
Central to many complex systems, spatial actors require an awareness of their local environment to enable behaviours such as communication and navigation. Complex system simulations represent this behaviour with Fixed Radius Near Neighbours (FRNN) search. This algorithm allows actors to store data at spatial locations and then query the data structure to find all data stored within a fixed radius of the search origin.
The work within this thesis answers the question: What techniques can be used for improving the performance of FRNN searches during complex system simulations on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs)?
It is generally agreed that Uniform Spatial Partitioning (USP) is the most suitable data structure for providing FRNN search on GPUs. However, due to the architectural complexities of GPUs, the performance is constrained such that FRNN search remains one of the most expensive common stages between complex systems models.
Existing innovations to USP highlight a need to take advantage of recent GPU advances, reducing the levels of divergence and limiting redundant memory accesses as viable routes to improve the performance of FRNN search. This thesis addresses these with three separate optimisations that can be used simultaneously.
Experiments have assessed the impact of optimisations to the general case of FRNN search found within complex system simulations and demonstrated their impact in practice when applied to full complex system models. Results presented show the performance of the construction and query stages of FRNN search can be improved by over 2x and 1.3x respectively. These improvements allow complex system simulations to be executed faster, enabling increases in scale and model complexity
Parallel fluid dynamics for the film and animation industries
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 142-149).The creation of automated fluid effects for film and media using computer simulations is popular, as artist time is reduced and greater realism can be achieved through the use of numerical simulation of physical equations. The fluid effects in today’s films and animations have large scenes with high detail requirements. With these requirements, the time taken by such automated approaches is large. To solve this, cluster environments making use of hundreds or more CPUs have been used. This overcomes the processing power and memory limitations of a single computer and allows very large scenes to be created. One of the newer methods for fluid simulation is the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM). This is a cellular automata type of algorithm, which parallelizes easily. An important part of the process of parallelization is load balancing; the distribution of computation amongst the available computing resources in the cluster. To date, the parallelization of the Lattice Boltzmann method only makes use of static load balancing. Instead, it is possible to make use of dynamic load balancing, which adjusts the computation distribution as the simulation progresses. Here, we investigate the use of the LBM in conjunction with a Volume of Fluid (VOF) surface representation in a parallel environment with the aim of producing large scale scenes for the film and animation industries. The VOF method tracks mass exchange between cells of the LBM. In particular, we implement the new dynamic load balancing algorithm to improve the efficiency of the fluid simulation using this method. Fluid scenes from films and animations have two important requirements: the amount of detail and the spatial resolution of the fluid. These aspects of the VOF LBM are explored by considering the time for scene creation using a single and multi-CPU implementation of the method. The scalability of the method is studied by plotting the run time, speedup and efficiency of scene creation against the number of CPUs. From such plots, an estimate is obtained of the feasibility of creating scenes of a giving level of detail. Such estimates enable the recommendation of architectures for creation of specific scenes. Using a parallel implementation of the VOF LBM method we successfully create large scenes with great detail. In general, considering the significant amounts of communication required for the parallel method, it is shown to scale well, favouring scenes with greater detail. The scalability studies show that the new dynamic load balancing algorithm improves the efficiency of the parallel implementation, but only when using lower number of CPUs. In fact, for larger number of CPUs, the dynamic algorithm reduces the efficiency. We hypothesise the latter effect can be removed by making using of centralized load balancing decision instead of the current decentralized approach. The use of a cluster comprising of 200 CPUs is recommended for the production of large scenes of a grid size 6003 in a reasonable time frame
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