Parallelizing a real-time physics engine using transactional memory

• Authors: Jaswanth Sreeram;Santosh Pande
• Venue: Euro-Par'11 Proceedings of the 17th international conference on Parallel processing - Volume Part II
• Year: 2011

The simulation of the dynamics and kinematics of solid bodies is an important problem in a wide variety of fields in computing ranging from animation and interactive environments to scientific simulations. While rigid body simulation has a significant amount of potential parallelism, efficiently synchronizing irregular accesses to the large amount of mutable shared data in such programs remains a hurdle. There has been a significant amount of interest in transactional memory systems for their potential to alleviate some of the problems associated with fine-grained locking and more broadly for writing correct and efficient parallel programs. While results so far are promising, the effectiveness of TM systems has so far been predominantly evaluated on small benchmarks and kernels. In this paper we present our experiences in parallelizing ODE, a realtime physics engine that is widely used in commercial and open source games. Rigid body simulation in ODE consists of two main phases that are amenable to effective coarse-grained parallelization and which are also suitable for using transactions to orchestrate shared data synchronization. We found ODE to be a good candidate for applying parallelism and transactions to - it is a large real world application, there is a large amount of potential parallelism, it exhibits irregular access patterns and the amount of contention may vary at runtime. We present an experimental evaluation of our implementation of the parallel transactional ODE engine that shows speedups of up to 1.27x relative to the sequential version.