History
An early academic PPU research project named SPARTA (Simulation of Physics on A Real-Time Architecture) was carried out at Penn State and University of Georgia. This was a simple FPGA based PPU that was limited to two dimensions. This project was extended into a considerably more advanced ASIC-based system named HELLAS. February 2006 saw the release of the first dedicated PPU PhysX from Ageia (later merged into nVidia). The unit is most effective in accelerating particle systems, with only a small performance improvement measured for rigid body physics. The Ageia PPU is documented in depth in their US patent application #20050075849. Nvidia/Ageia no longer produces PPUs and hardware acceleration for physics processing is now supported through some of their graphics processing units.
- Academic PPU research projects
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Example SPARTA animation
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SPARTA Printed circuit board
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Hellas die photo
Read more about this topic: Physics Processing Unit
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