Two-Level Constraint Solver and Pipelined Local Batching for Rigid Body Simulation on GPUs

GPUs are attractive processors to execute large-scale dynamic physics simulations because of their high bandwidth and computational power. Studies on accelerating relatively simple simulations include particle-based [Harada et al. 07], cloth [Zeller 05], and grid-based fluid [Harris 04] simulations. However, there are few works on accelerating rigid body simulation using GPUs. Rigid body simulation in general consists of broad-phase collision detection, narrow-phase collision detection, and constraint solving [van den Bergen 03]. Each stage has challenges.