Plausible mass-spring system using parallel computing on mobile devices

Abstract

Recently the hardware performance of mobile devices have been extremely increased and advanced mobile devices provide multi-cores and high clock speed. In addition, mobile devices have advantages in mobility and portability compared with PC and Console, so many games and simulation programs have been developed under mobile environments. Physically-based simulation is a one of the key issues for deformable object modeling which is widely used to represent the realistic expression of 3D soft objects with tetrahedrons for game and 3D simulation. However, it requires high computation power to plausibly and realistically represent the physical behaviors and interactions of deformable objects. In this paper, we implemented parallel cloth and mass-spring simulation using graphics processing unit (GPU) with OpenCL and multi-threaded central processing unit (CPU) on a mobile device. We applied CPU and GPU parallel computing technique into spring force computation and integration methods such as Euler, Midpoint, 4th-order Runge-Kutta to optimize the computational burden of dynamic simulation. The integration methods compute the next step of positions and velocities in each node. In this paper, we tested the performance analysis for the spring force calculation and integration method process using CPU only, multi-threaded CPU, and GPU on mobile device respectively. Our experimental results concluded that the calculation using proposed multi-threaded CPU and GPU multi-threaded CPU are much faster than using just the CPU only.