Planetarium/Physics Library Undergraduate physics major project

I’ve been looking at cuda now for a little bit. I’ve gotten pycuda installed and been playing around with the sdk as well. My goal is to make a library for sph simulations as well as nbody simulations. I’d like to have python bindings for this such that we can render our simulations in blender and make these simulations easy to run for future researchers/students.

Right now I’m learning the api and the grid structures. I’m also learning how these two simulation types are parallelized into the cuda world.

How hard an undertaking would it be to port the nbody and particles simulations in the SDK into a library with a python callable api using pycuda? This would enable us to make renders of solar system formation,asteroid collisions etc. All these renders would then be available to watch on the dome our planetarium for extra coolness.

I have about a year to do this project.

I’m new to sph and have written a few trivial nbody codes before. Any direction provided would be excellent.

I can’t really help you with your task, but let me ask a question: what kind of video projection system is installed in your planetarium. Is it a full-dome digital projection?

It’s a full digital dome @ 1024x1024. That is one of the reasons we want to go the blender route. A colleague of mine has figured out how to project his blender projects through the correct lens to render images on the dome.