Linear Solvers for Stable Fluids: GPU vs CPU

Abstract

Fluid simulation has been an active research field in computer graphics for the last 30 years. Stam's stable fluids method, among others, is used for solving equations that govern fluids. This method solves a sparse linear system during the diffusion and move steps, using either relaxation methods (Jacobi, Gauss-Seidel, etc ), Conjugate Gradient (and its variants), or others (not subject of study in this paper). A comparative pe,formance analysis between a parallel GPU-based (using CUDA) algorithm and a serial CPU-based algorithm, in both 2D and 3D, is given with the corresponding implementation of Jacobi (J), Gauss-Seidel (GS) and Conjugate Gradient (CG) solvers.