GameDev: GPU-accelerated model for dust evolution
Abstract
Grain growth and fragmentation through dust collisions in protoplanetary disks are strongly coupled with dust dynamics. This is because the spatial and velocity distributions of dust set the collision rates and outcomes, while dust grain sizes set the aerodynamic coupling with gas. However, existing dust evolution codes often rely on prescribed dust velocities and are mostly restricted to one or two spatial dimensions. In this work, we present GameDev, a dust evolution model accelerated by graphics processing units (GPUs) that couples independently evolved three-dimensional dust dynamics with Monte Carlo collisional evolution of dust. In GameDev, we model dust as Lagrangian representative particles in a prescribed gas disk. We integrate particle trajectories with the staggered semi-analytic method, which remains accurate for both tightly and weakly coupled dust grains. We estimate collision rates from each particle's nearest neighbors rather than on a grid, preventing physically close particles from being excluded from collision sampling because they lie across a grid boundary. Most importantly, we sample collision events against neighborhoods that remain frozen over adaptive intervals, enabling massive parallelization across particles. These implementations make GameDev an accurate and efficient tool for studying dust evolution in protoplanetary disks. GameDev supports both NVIDIA CUDA and AMD ROCm platforms, provides a smaller-scale standalone Eulerian dust fluid model, and is publicly available on GitHub.
Related
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BibTeX
@misc{bi2026gamedev,
title = {{GameDev: GPU-accelerated model for dust evolution}},
author = {Jiaqing Bi},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.35967},
eprint = {2609.35967},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35967},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - GameDev: GPU-accelerated model for dust evolution
AU - Jiaqing Bi
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/28
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.35967
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35967
AB - Grain growth and fragmentation through dust collisions in protoplanetary disks are strongly coupled with dust dynamics. This is because the spatial and velocity distributions of dust set the collision rates and outcomes, while dust grain sizes set the aerodynamic coupling with gas. However, existing dust evolution codes often rely on prescribed dust velocities and are mostly restricted to one or two spatial dimensions. In this work, we present GameDev, a dust evolution model accelerated by graphics processing units (GPUs) that couples independently evolved three-dimensional dust dynamics with Monte Carlo collisional evolution of dust. In GameDev, we model dust as Lagrangian representative particles in a prescribed gas disk. We integrate particle trajectories with the staggered semi-analytic method, which remains accurate for both tightly and weakly coupled dust grains. We estimate collision rates from each particle's nearest neighbors rather than on a grid, preventing physically close particles from being excluded from collision sampling because they lie across a grid boundary. Most importantly, we sample collision events against neighborhoods that remain frozen over adaptive intervals, enabling massive parallelization across particles. These implementations make GameDev an accurate and efficient tool for studying dust evolution in protoplanetary disks. GameDev supports both NVIDIA CUDA and AMD ROCm platforms, provides a smaller-scale standalone Eulerian dust fluid model, and is publicly available on GitHub.
ER -