[Opensim-dev] Feature Proposal: BulletSim GPU Acceleration via OpenCL

[Sean McNamara]

Hi,

On 9/10/13, Adams, Robert <robert.adams at intel.com> wrote:
> I (the main worker on BulletSim) will edit the proposal page but, I will
> say, the main reason I chose to work with Bullet was for its promise of
> having hardware acceleration. There have been versions of Bullet that use
> Cuda and OpenCL and I did some early testing. Erwin has been teasing Bullet
> 3 for a few years now which is supposed to have real OpenCL support.

Thanks, Robert! I've made a few edits to the wiki since I sent the
first email, but I'm going to lay off for now and give you time to
make your desired changes. I do hope that Bullet upstream continues to
work away at a stable Bullet 3 release and continual evolution of the
OpenCL accelerated pipelines. Unless an OpenSim developer also happens
to have the background and knowledge to contribute to Bullet upstream,
we're kind of dependent on them to succeed before we can do our thing.

>
> While not stated explicitly anywhere, my wish is for eventual complete
> parallel physics support -- both multi-threading and OpenCL.

This certainly seems to be the way forward. I'm sure there are some
workloads that the CPU simply does better; on top of that, if the GPU
is pegged but there are spare CPU cycles, it couldn't hurt to continue
pushing some subset of the physics through the CPU for maximum
throughput.

Thanks,

Sean

>
> -- ra
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: opensim-dev-bounces at lists.berlios.de
> [mailto:opensim-dev-bounces at lists.berlios.de] On Behalf Of Sean McNamara
> Sent: Tuesday, September 10, 2013 10:31 AM
> To: opensim-dev
> Subject: [Opensim-dev] Feature Proposal: BulletSim GPU Acceleration via
> OpenCL
>
> Hi, all.
>
> I think my proposal mostly speaks for itself, so I won't belabor the point
> in this email. Suffice it to say, if you are interested in performance of
> OpenSimulator, and in particular physical objects performance, please check
> out my feature proposal here and provide feedback, either by editing the
> page directly or replying to this email.
>
> http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Feature_Proposals/BulletSim_OpenCL
>
> Thanks!
>
> Sean McNamara
> _______________________________________________
> Opensim-dev mailing list
> Opensim-dev at lists.berlios.de
> https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-dev
> _______________________________________________
> Opensim-dev mailing list
> Opensim-dev at lists.berlios.de
> https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-dev
>