high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Visualising and simulating charged plasma systems present additional challenges to conventional particle methods. Plasmas exhibit multi scale phenomena that often prevent the use of standard localisation approximations. Plasmas as particle systems that emit light are important in many interesting components of games, computer animated movies such as weapons fire, explosions, astronomical effects. They also have intrinsic value for simulating physical phenomena. We describe the use of various shader and texture methods to render a simulated plasma system based on explicitly charged particles. We report on attainable renderings and on coding approaches and performance using graphical processing units.