Massive Particle Simulation with Lennard-Jones Forces
The goal of this student project (carried out by Bastian Hassel) was to simulate particle systems, where the so-called Lennard-Jones acts between pairs of particles, with as many particles as possible while still keeping the computations (almost) real-time. The Lennard-Jones potential is a simple model to approximate the interaction between a pair of neutral atoms. Our simulation algorithms run on a GPU (implemented with Direct3D compute shaders).
This article explains a little bit more about the implementation and the techniques used to achieve good performance. Currently, the simulation can simulate 256k particles with around 10 FPS.
Here is a movie that shows a run of the simulation of 256k particles.
The color of the particles encodes their momentary velocity. This color coding is currently very simplistic, in that particles that are part of a slow-moving cluster should probably be rather blue; in the video, they are often red, because they jitter a lot within the cluster, which is an artefact of the simple, explicit Euler integration.
Screenshots:
Last modified: Tue Apr 08 18:57:54 MDT 2014