C++/ OpenGL Abelian Sandpile visualiser

Produces a live visulation of the Abelian Sandpile fractal.

All computation is completed on the GPU via OpenGL 4.3 compute shaders. The default sandpile of 2¹⁶ grains require 65,000 iterations to resolve and takes 8 seconds to complete on an AMD RX Vega running Ubuntu's free drivers.

Screenshots

Shows the completed render of the Abelian Sandpile.

The colors indicate:

• Light blue: Empty tile
• Dark blue: 1 high stack
• Yellow: 2 high stack
• Orange: 3 high stack
• Red: 4 or higher stack --> Only applicable when sandpile is still collapsing

Dependencies

Building from source requires:

• GLUT
• GLEW
• GLFW3

Build using make. Depending on your distro, remove the UBUNTU_FLAGS constant or change -lglfw to -lglfw3.