Physical simulation for animation and visual effects: parallelization and characterization for chip multiprocessors

We explore the emerging application area of physics-based simulation for computer animation and visual special effects. In particular, we examine its parallelization potential and characterize its behavior on a chip multiprocessor (CMP). Applications in this domain model and simulate natural phenomena, and often direct visual components of motion pictures. We study a set of three workloads that exemplify the span and complexity of physical simulation applications used in a production environment: fluid dynamics, facial animation, and cloth simulation. They are computationally demanding, requiring from a few seconds to several minutes to simulate a single frame; therefore, they can benefit greatly from the acceleration possible with large scale CMPs. Starting with serial versions of these applications, we parallelize code accounting for at least 96% of the serial execution time, targeting a large number of threads. We then study the most expensive modules using a simulated 64-core CM...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Christopher J. Hughes, Radek Grzeszczuk, Eftychios Sifakis, Daehyun Kim, Sanjeev Kumar, Andrew Selle, Jatin Chhugani, Matthew J. Holliman, Yen-Kuang Chen
• Keywords: Cloth Simulations, Hardware, ISCA 2007, Physical Simulation Applications, Visual Special Effects