An Object-Oriented Particle System for Simulation and Visualization

Particle systems have been used successfully in applications ranging from simulations of physical phenomena, to creation of special effects in the movie industry, to scientific visualization. One problem encountered in practice is that application programmers usually derive a new code from scratch for each application even though particle systems have a basic object-oriented flavor. In this paper, we demonstrate a simple objectoriented particle system that has been implemented in C++ and applied to a variety of applications including graphical special effects, Lennard-Jones fluid simulation, isosurface extraction, and generation of streamlines from flow simulations. In each case, the code was developed from the basic particle system in a very short time. We shall also show comparisons with non-object-oriented codes that demonstrate that the objectorientation has only a small performance penalty. We shall also demonstrate parallelization of our simulations.