DX11/DirectCompute Fluid Simulation

Jan Vlietinck has published a simple 200x200x200 fluid simulation that simulates and renders the result using the new DirectX11 DirectCompute GPU acceleration systems.

The calculations make use of a well known scheme of velocity advection, Jaccobi pressure solving and making the velocity divergence free by subtracting the gradient of the pressure.This is the so called Semi-Lagrangian scheme. A more accurate solver makes use of the second order MacCormack technique. The simulation makes use of the latter. However it makes the simulation unstable and introduces artifacts. Limiting generated extremes can fix this, unfortunately I was not able to get this working, so the simulation runs without limiters, still the result is some visual interesting turbulent behavior.

The amplitude of the speed vectors are visualized. To make a 3d rendering, a simple ray maximum projection is used. This shoots rays through the volume searching the maximum speed along the ray. With a linear interpolation the speed is given some color.

via Fast software renderer.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .

Science directx, directx11, gpgpu, simulation