CS 525 Project 2

To make the collision more obvious we can use just the disk and bulge locations and avoid the halo. That still leaves 49152 stars. OpenGL can easily draw that many stars but the gravity calculations will need to be simplified to do them in realtime.

Chapter 31 of GPU-gems 3 "Fast N-Body Simulation with CUDA" deals with this topic in detail so that would be a good place to look before you start coding this in CUDA. This chapter is provided as part of the n-body CUDA demo.

CUDA will be dealing with computing and updating the particle positions. OpenGL will be used to display the results. Initially you should see something like this:

as the simulation progresses the two galaxies will pass through each other and their structures will rapidly break down with lots of stars flying all over the place, but then gravity will pull the remnants back together into a new strutcure.

Your first job is to write CUDA and OpenGL code to make the galaxy collision happen realistically within a reasonable amount of time. As part of this you should allow the user to dynamically change their viewpoint of the interaction through rotation and zoom. You should not need pan but you can add it if you want. You should allow the user to choose various colour schemes (e.g. each galaxy has a different colour, or the different parts of the galaxy have differnet colours.) One colour scheme I found useful in degugging was using r, g, and b to show the velocities of individual stars in the x, y, and z directions, since that makes it easier to see what direction groups stars are moving in and to see when their velocities begin to change during the collision.

The capability of your graphics card will determine how many stars you can compute with. I would suggest starting off by reading in and just displaying all the stars to make sure you have the data read in correctly, then pick a subset of the stars to work with (e.g. every 10th star, every 5th star, etc) in CUDA. You may also want to stagger the computations so not every star is updated every iteration. The particle demos from class should be a good starting point.

Your next job is to work on optimizing this code and investigate how various parameters affect the efficiency of CUDA. A major focus here is documenting your efforts so you can explain to the class how you improved the speed of your code (or increased the number of particles you could compute with.)

You should then create some more scenarios. e.g. instead of a full collision maybe its a near miss, or just the edges collide, or the angle of the collision changes. You could also create more datasets, e.g. a globular cluster, or a bunch of stars in a plane or the homer simpson galaxy.

Note that you should not expect to see a nice spiral arm structure in your visualization. You should see the rotating disc and a compact central bulge of each galaxy before the collision. You will probably need to play with some of the gravity parameters to keep the galaxy structure intact.

As with the previous project, to turn in your project you should set up a web page describing your work, including the well-commented source code and required files to be able to compile and run your program, and a movie in a common web-viewable format showing what your application should look like when its running. You should then email andy with the location of this website before the deadline. It would probably be a good idea to put a backup copy of the web page at a second website just in case I can't get to the first one.

When you send andy the location of your webpage you should again email a screen snapshot of your head that is 320 pixels wide by 240 pixels tall in jpeg format named <your_last_name>.p2.jpg. This image will be used on the class web pages along with the link to your project web page.

As with the previous project, each student will also give a presentation about their project in-class and answer some questions about your work. This time the presentation will be 20 minutes long. You should prepare a good presentation - you can use your project website, or create some slides. You should definitely run your code and talk about how you structured the computation in CUDA. Be sure to practice your presentation so you finish within the alloted time so everyone has equal time to present.

Project 2 - CUDA, CUDA, CUDA