A parallel cloth simulator using multilevel algorithms

Certain aspects of a computer-generated world have always been difficult to simulate. Cloth is one such example since, unlike a rigid object, it is flexible and subject to many internal and external forces which drive the fabric into a natural form. As a consequence of these difficulties, realistic simulations demand a significant computational cost, which makes parallel computing highly advantageous (Romero et al., 2000). We analyze the OpenMP-based parallelization of a virtual cloth simulator based on multilevel techniques that attempts to simulate the manner in which cloth drapes. OpenMP not only offers a fast and direct way to treat the hierarchy of data structures employed in our simulator, but also achieves satisfactory efficiencies on the three different platforms studied: a SGI Origin 2000, a SUN HPC 6500 and an IBM SP2.