Parallel Simulation of Cloth on Distributed Memory Architectures

Abstract

The physically based simulation of clothes in virtual environments is a highly demanding problem. It involves both modeling the internal material properties of the textile and the interaction with the surrounding scene. We present a parallel cloth simulation approach designed for distributed memory parallel architectures, in particular clusters built of commodity components. In this paper, we focus on the parallelization of the collision handling phase. In order to cope with the high irregularity of this problem we employ a task parallel approach with fully dynamic problem decomposition. This leads to a robust algorithm, regardless of the complexity of the scene. We report on initial performance measurements indicating the usefulness of our approach.