Physical simulation of 3D dynamical surfaces on graphics clusters

Physically-based simulation represents a research field of great interest in computer graphics. Mass-spring systems provide a simple yet powerful solution to simulating soft, deformable bodies such as cloth, but have a very high computational cost, especially with high resolution models. Even with highly parallel architectures such as graphics clusters providing the computational power required for these simulations, efficient parallel techniques are needed in order to obtain the best performance in real-time. In this paper we experiment and evaluate a graphics cluster based solution for physical cloth modeling, highlighting issues that arise with model distribution, communication among nodes, distributed rendering and parallel techniques that can be integrated in order to obtain an efficient simulation method, capable of handling complex physical models.