The importance of the growth, proliferation and longevity of reef-forming cold-water corals is paramount as they support various complex bio-diverse habitats and provide many essential ecosystem services. These cold-water coral reefs consist of layers of living coral tissue that grow above large masses of coral skeleton. Here, the Goldilocks Principle is used to promote growth in ‘just right’ conditions and model how cold-water corals engineer their habitat to survive and prosper. A computational fluid dynamics model is created based on the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics method, a mesh-free Lagrangian numerical method. The SPH solver is written in the C++ programming language and parallelised with OpenMP to improve its efficiency and reduce the execution times. The solver is validated against analytical and numerical solutions.