Simit: A Language for Physical Simulation
Abstract
With existing programming tools, writing high-performance simulation code is labor intensive and requires sacrificing readability and portability. Here, the alternative is to prototype simulations in a high-level language like Matlab, thereby sacrificing performance. The Matlab programming model naturally describes the behavior of an entire physical system using the language of linear algebra. However, simulations also manipulate individual geometric elements, which are best represented using linked data structures like meshes. Translating between the linked data structures and linear algebra comes at significant cost, both to the programmer and to the machine. High-performance implementations avoid the cost by rephrasing the computation in terms of linked or index data structures, leaving the code complicated and monolithic, often increasing its size by an order of magnitude. In this article, we present Simit, a new language for physical simulations that lets the programmer view the system both as a linked data structure in the form of a hypergraph and as a set of global vectors, matrices, and tensors depending on what is convenient at any given time. Simit provides a novel assembly construct that makes it conceptually easy and computationally efficient to move between the two abstractions. Using the information provided by the assembly construct,more »
- Authors:
-
- Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States)
- Adobe, Cambridge, MA (United States)
- Stanford Univ., Stanford, CA (United States)
- Disney Research (United States)
- California Polytechnic State Univ., San Luis Obispo, CA (United States)
- Univ. of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX (United States)
- Adobe, Seattle, WA (United States)
- Publication Date:
- Research Org.:
- Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States)
- Sponsoring Org.:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR)
- OSTI Identifier:
- 1557575
- Grant/Contract Number:
- SC0005288
- Resource Type:
- Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Name:
- ACM Transaction on Graphics
- Additional Journal Information:
- Journal Volume: 35; Journal Issue: 2; Journal ID: ISSN 0730-0301
- Publisher:
- ACM
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
- Subject:
- 97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING; Graph; Matrix; Tensor; Simulation
Citation Formats
Kjolstad, Fredrik, Matusik, Wojciech, Amarasinghe, Saman, Kamil, Shoaib, Ragan-Kelley, Jonathan, Levin, David I. W., Sueda, Shinjiro, Chen, Desai, Vouga, Etienne, Kaufman, Danny M., and Kanwar, Gurtej. Simit: A Language for Physical Simulation. United States: N. p., 2016.
Web. doi:10.1145/2866569.
Kjolstad, Fredrik, Matusik, Wojciech, Amarasinghe, Saman, Kamil, Shoaib, Ragan-Kelley, Jonathan, Levin, David I. W., Sueda, Shinjiro, Chen, Desai, Vouga, Etienne, Kaufman, Danny M., & Kanwar, Gurtej. Simit: A Language for Physical Simulation. United States. https://doi.org/10.1145/2866569
Kjolstad, Fredrik, Matusik, Wojciech, Amarasinghe, Saman, Kamil, Shoaib, Ragan-Kelley, Jonathan, Levin, David I. W., Sueda, Shinjiro, Chen, Desai, Vouga, Etienne, Kaufman, Danny M., and Kanwar, Gurtej. Tue .
"Simit: A Language for Physical Simulation". United States. https://doi.org/10.1145/2866569. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1557575.
@article{osti_1557575,
title = {Simit: A Language for Physical Simulation},
author = {Kjolstad, Fredrik and Matusik, Wojciech and Amarasinghe, Saman and Kamil, Shoaib and Ragan-Kelley, Jonathan and Levin, David I. W. and Sueda, Shinjiro and Chen, Desai and Vouga, Etienne and Kaufman, Danny M. and Kanwar, Gurtej},
abstractNote = {With existing programming tools, writing high-performance simulation code is labor intensive and requires sacrificing readability and portability. Here, the alternative is to prototype simulations in a high-level language like Matlab, thereby sacrificing performance. The Matlab programming model naturally describes the behavior of an entire physical system using the language of linear algebra. However, simulations also manipulate individual geometric elements, which are best represented using linked data structures like meshes. Translating between the linked data structures and linear algebra comes at significant cost, both to the programmer and to the machine. High-performance implementations avoid the cost by rephrasing the computation in terms of linked or index data structures, leaving the code complicated and monolithic, often increasing its size by an order of magnitude. In this article, we present Simit, a new language for physical simulations that lets the programmer view the system both as a linked data structure in the form of a hypergraph and as a set of global vectors, matrices, and tensors depending on what is convenient at any given time. Simit provides a novel assembly construct that makes it conceptually easy and computationally efficient to move between the two abstractions. Using the information provided by the assembly construct, the compiler generates efficient in-place computation on the graph. We demonstrate that Simit is easy to use: a Simit program is typically shorter than a Matlab program; that it is high performance: a Simit program running sequentially on a CPU performs comparably to hand-optimized simulations; and that it is portable: Simit programs can be compiled for GPUs with no change to the program, delivering 4 to 20× speedups over our optimized CPU code.},
doi = {10.1145/2866569},
journal = {ACM Transaction on Graphics},
number = 2,
volume = 35,
place = {United States},
year = {Tue Mar 29 00:00:00 EDT 2016},
month = {Tue Mar 29 00:00:00 EDT 2016}
}
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