One of the current challenges in physically-based simulations, and, more specifically, fluid simulations, is to produce visually appealing results at interactive rates, capable of being used in multiple forms of media. In recent times, a lot of effort has been made with regards to this with the use of multi-core architectures, as many of the computations involved in the algorithms for these simulations are very well suited for these architectures. Although there is a considerable amount of works regarding acceleration techniques in this field, there is yet room to further explore and analyze some of them. To investigate this problem, we surveyed the topic of fluid simulations and some of the recent contributions towards this field. Additionally, we implemented two versions of a fluid simulation algorithm, one on the CPU and the other on the GPU using NVIDIA's CUDA framework, with the intent of gaining a better understanding of the effort needed to move these simulations to a multi-core architecture and the performance gains that we get with it.

翻译：基于物理的模拟，特别是流体模拟，当前面临的挑战之一是在交互速率下生成视觉上吸引人的效果，并能够应用于多种媒体形式。近年来，利用多核架构在这一方面投入了大量努力，因为这类模拟算法所涉及的许多计算非常适合这些架构。尽管该领域已有大量关于加速技术的研究，但仍有一些技术值得进一步探索和分析。为探究这一问题，我们对流体模拟主题及相关领域的最新贡献进行了综述。此外，我们实现了两个版本的流体模拟算法：一个运行于CPU，另一个使用NVIDIA的CUDA框架运行于GPU，旨在更深入地理解将这些模拟迁移至多核架构所需的工作量以及由此带来的性能提升。