Interactive Physical Simulation on Multicore Architectures

Everton Hermann (1, 2) , Bruno Raffin (2, 3) , François Faure (4, 5, 6, 7)

1 LIG - Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble
2 MOAIS - PrograMming and scheduling design fOr Applications in Interactive Simulation
3 LIFO - Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale d'Orléans
4 LJK - Laboratoire Jean Kuntzmann
5 EVASION - Virtual environments for animation and image synthesis of natural objects
6 UJF - Université Joseph Fourier - Grenoble 1
7 ALCOVE - Collaborative interactive virtual environment

In this paper we propose a parallelization of interactive physical simulations. Our approach relies on a task parallelism where the code is instrumented to mark tasks and shared data between tasks, as well as parallel loops even if they have dynamics conditions. Prior to running a simulation step, we extract a task dependency graph that is partitioned to define the task distribution between processors. To limit the overhead of graph partitioning and favor memory locality, we intend to limit the partitioning changes from one iteration to the other. This approach has a low impact on physics algorithms as parallelism is mainly extracted from the coordination code. It makes it non parallel programmer friendly. Results show we can obtain good performance gains.

Domaines: Synthèse d'image et réalité virtuelle [cs.GR]; Calcul parallèle, distribué et partagé [cs.DC]

Everton Hermann, Bruno Raffin, François Faure. Interactive Physical Simulation on Multicore Architectures. Eurographics Workhop on Parallel Graphics and Visualization, Mar 2009, Munich, Germany. ⟨inria-00360131v1⟩