[Opensim-dev] thread from ODE in regards to physics acceleration

[Eugen Leitl]

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Eugen Leitl   	
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	 More options Oct 31, 1:51 pm
From: Eugen Leitl <ele... at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2008 05:51:40 -0700 (PDT)
Local: Fri, Oct 31 2008 1:51 pm
Subject: hardware acceleration
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Has there any work being done on accelerating some ODE features (say,
collision detection) using ATI/nVidia GPUs? I wasn't able to find
anything so far.

Those familiar with both AMD Stream and CUDA, which architecture
provides a better match for ODE?

With 1 GByte on-card memory, how much scene complexity (e.g. in
OpenSim) can I expect to handle without resorting swapping to main
memory?

Thanks.

		
Daniel K. O.   	
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	 More options Nov 1, 12:37 am
From: "Daniel K. O." <danielko.lis... at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:37:44 -0200
Local: Sat, Nov 1 2008 12:37 am
Subject: Re: [ode-users] hardware acceleration
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Eugen Leitl escreveu:

> Has there any work being done on accelerating some ODE features (say,
> collision detection) using ATI/nVidia GPUs? I wasn't able to find
> anything so far.

I'm working on a dWorldStep implementation in CUDA, but it's not
complete, nor optimized. Hopefully I'll have some time to finish it in
two or three moths (hopefully with some other operations, like
narrow-phase collision detection too).

> Those familiar with both AMD Stream and CUDA, which architecture
> provides a better match for ODE?

I think NVIDIA is doing a better job promoting CUDA than AMD
promoting... whatever it's the current name.

Feature-wise they are incredibly similar. I don't have much experience
with FireStream, but apparently it doesn't expose different types of
memory like CUDA does, so you have to trust the platform (which IMHO you
shouldn't for any new technology) to do the correct optimizations.

-- 
Daniel K. O.
"The only way to succeed is to build success yourself"

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gl   	
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	 More options Nov 1, 1:08 am
From: "gl" <g... at ntlworld.com>
Date: Sat, 1 Nov 2008 00:08:35 -0000
Local: Sat, Nov 1 2008 1:08 am
Subject: Re: [SPAM?][ode-users] Re: hardware acceleration
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> Eugen Leitl escreveu:
>> Has there any work being done on accelerating some ODE features (say,
>> collision detection) using ATI/nVidia GPUs? I wasn't able to find
>> anything so far.

Apparently the Bullet guys are working on CUDA too, might be worth checking
out:  http://www.bulletphysics.com/Bullet/wordpress/
-- 
gl

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Erwin Coumans   	
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	 More options Nov 1, 1:16 am
From: "Erwin Coumans" <erwin.coum... at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:16:50 -0700
Local: Sat, Nov 1 2008 1:16 am
Subject: Re: [ode-users] Re: [SPAM?][ode-users] Re: hardware acceleration
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We are indeed working on a broadphase, narrowphase and constraint solver in
CUDA for Bullet. This parallel constraint solver is similar to quickstep.
Some results will be discussed at the Game Developers Conference in 2009.

CUDA is probably the best way to go for now. It will likely be easy to port
from CUDA to OpenCL in the future (both NVidia and AMD will support OpenCL).
Hope this helps,
Erwin