GPU accelerated fast FEM deformation simulation

Abstract

In this paper we present a general FEM (finite element method) solution that enables fast dynamic deformation simulation on the newly available GPU (graphics processing unit) hardware with compute unified device architecture (CUDA) from NVIDIA. CUDA-enabled GPUs harness the power of 128 processors which allow data parallel computations. Compared to the previous GPGPU, it is significantly more flexible with a C language interface. We not only implement FEM deformation computation algorithms with CUDA but also analyze the performance in detail. Our test results indicate that the GPU with CUDA enables about 4 times speedup for FEM deformation computation on an Intel(R) Core 2 Quad 2.0 GHz machine with GeForce 8800 GTX.