Asynchronous Liquids: Regional Time Stepping for Faster SPH and PCISPH

TL;DR

This paper introduces asynchronous regional time stepping strategies for SPH and PCISPH simulations, significantly reducing computational costs while maintaining visual accuracy in dynamic free surface flows.

Contribution

It extends asynchronous time stepping techniques to incompressible SPH methods and decouples particle time steps, enabling faster simulations of free surface flows.

Findings

Typically doubles simulation speed

Maintains visual consistency in dynamic scenarios

Reduces computational effort in slow regions

Abstract

This paper presents novel and efficient strategies to spatially adapt the amount of computational effort applied based on the local dynamics of a free surface flow, for both classic weakly compressible SPH (WCSPH) and predictive-corrective incompressible SPH (PCISPH). Using a convenient and readily parallelizable block-based approach, different regions of the fluid are assigned differing time steps and solved at different rates to minimize computational cost. Our approach for WCSPH scheme extends an asynchronous SPH technique from compressible flow of astrophysical phenomena to the incompressible free surface setting, and further accelerates it by entirely decoupling the time steps of widely spaced particles. Similarly, our approach to PCISPH adjusts the the number of iterations of density correction applied to different regions, and asynchronously updates the neighborhood regions used to perform these corrections; this sharply reduces the computational cost of slowly deforming regions while preserving the standard density invariant. We demonstrate our approaches on a number of highly dynamic scenarios, demonstrating that they can typically double the speed of a simulation compared to standard methods while achieving visually consistent results.