Large-scale Fluid Simulation
using
Velocity-Vorticity Domain Decomposition

Abhinav Golas1   Rahul Narain2   Jason Sewall3   Pavel Krajcevski1   Pradeep Dubey3   Ming Lin1
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill1    University of California, Berkeley2    Intel Corporation3

SIGGRAPH Asia 2012



Abstract

Simulating fluids in large-scale scenes with appreciable quality using state-of-the-art methods can lead to high memory and compute requirements. Since memory requirements are proportional to the product of domain dimensions, simulation performance is limited by memory access, as solvers for elliptic problems are not compute-bound on modern systems. This is a significant concern for large-scale scenes. To reduce the memory footprint and memory/compute ratio, vortex singularity bases can be used. Though they form a compact bases for incompressible vector fields, robust and efficient modeling of nonrigid obstacles and free-surfaces can be challenging with these methods.

We propose a hybrid domain decomposition approach that couples Eulerian velocity-based simulations with vortex singularity simulations. Our formulation reduces memory footprint by using smaller Eulerian domains with compact vortex bases, thereby improving the memory/compute ratio, and simulation performance by more than 1000x for single phase flows as well as significant improvements for free-surface scenes. Coupling these two heterogeneous methods also affords flexibility in using the most appropriate method for modeling different scene features, as well as allowing robust interaction of vortex methods with free-surfaces and nonrigid obstacles.

Abhinav Golas, Rahul Narain, Jason Sewall, Pavel Krajcevski, Pradeep Dubey, and Ming C. Lin, 2012. Large-scale Fluid Simulation using Velocity-Vorticity Domain Decomposition. In ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH Asia 2012), vol. 31, no. 6.

Preprint (PDF, 3.1 MB)
Video (QuickTime, H264, 214 MB)

DOI

 

Abhinav Golas, Rahul Narain, Jason Sewall, Pavel Krajcevski, and Ming C. Lin, 2012. Efficient Large-scale Hybrid Fluid Simulation. ACM SIGGRAPH 2012 Technical Talks.

Abstract (PDF, 439 KB)

DOI