Speeding up fluids renders can be key to farm efficiency and iterations to a better effect. Using Mental Ray with low AA -3, -1 gives a fast good looking fluid render, so long as there are no hold out geometry objects. This is by no means the perfect tutorial, meaning you'll have to play with the settings to get the quality you need to the shot, but this is the way to get a big time savings.

We also cover, instanced destruction and voronoi shattering. But that's just a bonus side effect to get the main effect.