An Efficient GPU Implementation for Large Scale Individual-Based Simulation of Collective Behavior

In this work we describe a GPU implementation for an individual-based model for fish schooling. In this model each fish aligns its position and orientation with an appropriate average of its neighbors’ positions and orientations. This carries a very high computational cost in the so-called nearest neighbors search. By leveraging the GPU processing power and the new programming model called CUDA we implement an efficient framework which permits to simulate the collective motion of high-density individual groups. In particular we present as a case study a simulation of motion of millions of fishes. We describe our implementation and present extensive experiments which demonstrate the effectiveness of our GPU implementation.