Abstract
Although granular materials have always been an important part of our everyday life, their characteristics and behavior is still only rudimentally understood. Therefore the numerical simulation has gained an increasing importance to gain deeper insight into the properties of granular media. One simulation approach is rigid body dynamics. In contrast to particle-based approaches, it fully resolves the granular particles as geometric objects and incorporates frictional contact dynamics. However, due to its complexity and the lack of large-scale parallelization, rigid body dynamics so far could not be used for very large simulation scenarios.
In this paper we demonstrate massively parallel granular media simulations by means of a parallel rigid body dynamics algorithm. We will validate the algorithm for granular gas simulations and prove its scalability on up to 131 072 processor cores. Additionally, we will show several parallel granular material simulations both with spherical and non-spherical granular particles.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Buchholtz V, Freund J, Pöschel T (2000) Molecular dynamics of comminution in ball mills. Eur Phys J B 16:169–182
Griebel M, Knapek S, Zumbusch G (2008) Numerical simulation in molecular dynamics. Springer, Berlin
Pöschel T, Schwager T (2005) Computational granular dynamics: models and algorithms. Springer, Berlin
Fleissner F, Eberhard P (2007) Parallel load-balanced simulation for short-range interaction particle methods with hierarchical particle grouping based on orthogonal recursive bisection. Int J Numer Methods Eng 74:531–553
Anitescu M (2006) Optimization-based simulation of nonsmooth rigid multibody dynamics. Math Program 105(1):113–143. doi:10.1007/s10107-005-0590-7
Renouf M, Alart P (2005) Conjugate gradient type algorithms for frictional multi-contact problems: applications to granular materials. Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng 194:2019–2041
Preclik T (2008) Iterative rigid multibody dynamics. Diploma thesis, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Computer Science 10—Systemsimulation
Renouf M, Dubois F, Alart P (2003) A parallel version of the non smooth contact dynamics algorithm applied to the simulation of granular media. J Comput Appl Math 168:375–382
Iglberger K, Rüde U (2009) Massively parallel rigid body dynamics simulations. Comput Sci, Res Dev 23(3):159
Tasora A, Negrut D, Anitescu M (2008) Large-scale parallel multi-body dynamics with frictional contact on the graphical processing unit. Proc Inst Mech Eng Part K, J Multi-body Dyn 222(4):315–326
Kaufman DM, Edmunds T, Pai DK (2005) Fast frictional dynamics for rigid bodies. ACM Trans Graph 24:946–956. (SIGGRAPH 2005)
Wengenroth H (2007) Rigid body collisions. Master’s thesis, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Computer Science 10—Systemsimulation
Iglberger K, Rüde U (2009) The pe rigid multi-body physics engine. Tech. Rep. 09-9, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Computer Science 10—Systemsimulation
Gropp W, Skjellum A, Lusk E (1999) Using MPI. Portable parallel programming with the message passing interface, 2nd edn. MIT Press, Cambridge
Iglberger K, Rüde U (2009) Massively parallel rigid multi-body dynamics. Tech Rep 09-8, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Computer Science 10—Systemsimulation
Homepage of the Leibnitz Computing Center Munich. http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/english/index.html
Homepage of the Jülich Supercomputing Center (JSC). http://www.fz-juelich.de/jsc/
Woodcrest cluster of the Region Computing Center Erlangen (RRZE). http://www.rrze.uni-erlangen.de/dienste/arbeiten-rechnen/hpc/systeme/woodcrest-cluster.shtml
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Iglberger, K., Rüde, U. Massively parallel granular flow simulations with non-spherical particles. Comput Sci Res Dev 25, 105–113 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-010-0114-4
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-010-0114-4