Rocks are heterogeneous from the point of microstructure which is of significance to their dynamic failure behavior. Both the compressive and tensile strength of rock-like materials is regarded different from the static strength. The present study adopts smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) which is a virtual particle based meshfree method to investigate strain rate effect for heterogeneous brittle materials. The SPH method is capable of simulating rock fracture, free of the mesh constraint of the traditional FEM and FDM models. A pressure dependent J-H constitutive model involving heterogeneity is employed in the numerical modeling. The results show the compressive strength increases with the increase of strain rate as well as the tensile strength, which is important to the engineering design. Rocks are heterogeneous from the point of microstructure which is of significance to their dynamic failure behavior. Both the compressive and tensile strength of rock-like materials is treated as static force from the static strength. The present study adopts smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) which is a virtual particle based meshfree method to investigate strain rate effect for heterogeneous brittle materials. The SPH method is capable of simulating rock fracture, free of the mesh constraint of the traditional FEM and FDM models. A pressure dependent JH constitutive model involving heterogeneity is employed in the numerical modeling. The results show the compressive strength increases with the increase of strain rate as well as the tensile strength, which is important to the engineering design.