Analyzing Performance and Efficiency of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics

With the rise in performance of modern GPUs, Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics is an increasingly attractive solu-tion for real-time simulation of fluid flows in visual effects for film and games. Starting with simulations of 2000 parti-cles at 20 frames per second in 2003 [4], smoothed particle hydrodynamics has now been simulated with over 242,000 particles at 4 fps using GPUs [6]. While performance has clearly increased, the terms performance and efficiency are often used interchangeably. Results of simulations, as pub-lished in graphics journals such as SIGGRAPH, are typically reported by giving the number of particles and frame rate for a particular combination of CPU and graphics hardware. This makes comparisons of algorithm implementations diffi-cult since authors must deduce algorithm efficiency for dif-fering hardware. The development of concrete metrics of performance and efficiency will facilitate better comparison between results. Simple metrics are presented here with an analysis of real-time simulations over the past five years