Material Point Method based Fluid Simulation on GPU using Compute Shader

Fluid simulation, specifically the Material Point Method (MPM) based simulation, requires a large number of particles and a big grid size to create a realistic looking simulation. This paper explains what we can do to improve the performance of the simulation by using compute shader and the strategy behind it. Compute shader is a shader used for General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU) programming, running in a separate pipeline than the rendering pipeline. Since the MPM simulation requires serialized code to update the values of the grid nodes and particles, it becomes a challenge to implement it into a parallelized code that can be run on the GPU with compute shader. First, we have to plan which part of the code that can be parallelized. We also have to translate the code into a GLSL program that doesn't have any C/C++ pointer and Object Oriented class. We then compare the simulation performance between the one running on CPU and the compute shader one, and see how much improvement is made by implementing it with compute shader.