GPU based particle system

Abstract: GPGPU (General purpose computing on graphics processing unit) is quite common in today's modern computer games when doing heavy simulation calculations like game physics or particle systems. GPU programming is not only used in games but also in scientific research when doing heavy calculations on molecular structures and protein folding etc. The reason why you use the GPU for these kinds of tasks is that you can gain an incredible speedup in performance to your application. Previous research shows that particle systems scale very well to the GPU architecture. When simulating very large particle-system on the GPU it can run up to 79 times faster than the CPU. But for some very small particle systems the CPU proved to be faster. This research aims to compare the difference between the GPU and CPU when it comes to simulating many smaller particle-systems and to see what happen to the performance when the particle-systems become smaller and smaller.