Snow Simulator (created at NTNU HPC-Lab)

A real-time snow simulation created at the NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) HPC-lab.

The movement of each individual snowflake is simulated in real-time using a GPU. A windfield affects the snow particles, in addition to gravity and a spiraling motion. The windfield is simulated with CFD methods (extensions of Stable Fluids), using an SOR-based iterative equation solver for calculating the pressure field. As snow builds up on the ground, the texture changes, as well as the level of the ground. The simulation is programmed for CUDA, the visualization is made using OpenGL.

The application was not created by me, but was the result of the master thesis of Robin Eidissen - http://www.idi.ntnu.no/~elster/master-studs/robine/robin-eidissen-master-ntnu...
For an interview of Robin Eidissen on SC08, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWIFSvXqvEo
The simulator has been used further in projects this year, among which are investigating using a real-time Lattice Boltzmann fluid solver (which was my personal project), creating avalanches and utilizing ray-tracing for certain elements.

NTNU HPC-lab website: http://www.idi.ntnu.no/~elster/hpc-lab/

In the video, the simulations are run on a NVIDIA Tesla C1060 GPU, on a machine with a Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 CPU. The number of particles used were about 131k, the fluid simulation was run on a 128x32x128 grid. It is possible to run both larger fluid grids, and up to millions of snow particles. The simulation can also be run smoothly on much lower-end hardware, ie. a Geforce 8 series GPU, depending on the configuration.

The music used in this video is "People" by the artist "Sharp" -http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/3596
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• GPU
• snow
• snowsimulation
• Tesla
• NVIDIA
• NTNU
• IDI
• HPC
• SOR
• Lattice
• Boltzmann
• fluid
• real-time

[00ayanamirei]

@00ayanamirei hahaha, should have paid more attention at the end ;)

[00ayanamirei]

Beautiful!:-) HPC Lab does impressive stuff. Where can I find the music?

[TriKri]

What did the pattern consisting of the yellow dots and later the yellow lines come from?

[paladin12122]

WoW

[podtech115]

really nice music