Physically based simulation of cloth on distributed memory architectures

Physically based simulation of cloth in virtual environments is a computationally demanding problem. It involves modeling the internal material properties of the textile (physical modeling) and also treating interactions with the surrounding scene (collision handling). In this paper, we present an approach to parallel cloth simulation designed for distributed memory parallel architectures, particularly clusters built of commodity components. We discuss parallel techniques for the physical modeling phase as well as for the collision handling phase which can significantly reduce the respective computation times. To deal with the very fine granularity of the physical modeling phase we apply a static data decomposition approach based on graph partitioning. In order to cope with the high irregularity of the collision handling phase we employ taskparallel techniques based on fully dynamic problem decomposition. We show how both techniques can be integrated into a robust parallel cloth simulation method which can deal with considerably complex scenes. 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.