GPU Smoke Simulation on Compressed DCT Space

Abstract: This paper presents a novel GPU-based algorithm for smoke animation. Our primary contribution is the use of Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) compressed space for efficient simulation. We show that our method runs an order of magnitude faster than a CPU implementation while retaining visual details with a smaller memory usage. The key component of our method is an on-the-fly compression and expansion of velocity, pressure and density fields. Whenever these physical quantities are requested during a simulation, we perform data expansion and compression only where necessary in a loop. As a consequence, our simulation allows us to simulate a large domain without actually allocating full memory space for it. We show that albeit our method comes with some extra cost for DCT manipulations, such cost can be minimized with the aid of a devised shared memory usage.