Taichi, a perfect programming framework for computer graphics courses.

In Fall 2021, the Computer Graphics Laboratory (CGL) at ETH Zurich offered a course on physically based simulation, which requires students to create a small game or a demo scene using techniques they learned in class. The vast majority of the student groups chose the Taichi programming language for real-time physical simulation.

Goal

Select an efficient parallel programming language and use it to implement a physically based simulation project.

Why Taichi

• Seamlessly embedded in Python: Easier to learn, more intuitive, and as fast as CUDA.

• Taichi's GGUI system makes 3D rendering a breeze.

• A single-source framework: Automatically falls back to CPUs if your system doesn't have CUDA or a powerful GPU.

• An active community and a wide range of reference code make it easy to get started.

Results

• 90% of the projects chose Taichi, and all were completed with flying colors.

• Achieved comparable performance to C++/CUDA with much less code.

Requests for improvement: The future

• Enriched GGUI tooling.
• More descriptive error reports.
• Move comprehensive benchmark reports.
• Further reduced compile time.