Real-time simulation of industrial equipment is a huge challenge nowadays. The high performance and fine-grained parallel computing provided by graphics processing units （GPUs） bring us closer to our goals. In this ...Real-time simulation of industrial equipment is a huge challenge nowadays. The high performance and fine-grained parallel computing provided by graphics processing units （GPUs） bring us closer to our goals. In this article, an industrial-scale rotating drum is simulated using simplified discrete element method （DEM） without consideration of the tangential components of contact force and particle rotation. A single GPU is used first to simulate a small model system with about 8000 particles in real-time, and the simulation is then scaled up to industrial scale using more than 200 GPUs in a 1 D domain-decomposition parallelization mode. The overall speed is about 1/11 of the real-time. Optimization of the communication part of the parallel GPU codes can speed up the simulation further, indicating that such real-time simulations have not only methodological but also industrial implications in the near future.展开更多
基金sponsored by the Ministry of Science and Tech-nology under the grant 2007DFA41320the Ministry of Financeunder the grant ZDYZ2008-2+1 种基金National Key Science and Tech-nology Project under the grant 2008ZX05014-003-006HZthe National Natural Science Foundation of China under theGrant 20821092
文摘Real-time simulation of industrial equipment is a huge challenge nowadays. The high performance and fine-grained parallel computing provided by graphics processing units （GPUs） bring us closer to our goals. In this article, an industrial-scale rotating drum is simulated using simplified discrete element method （DEM） without consideration of the tangential components of contact force and particle rotation. A single GPU is used first to simulate a small model system with about 8000 particles in real-time, and the simulation is then scaled up to industrial scale using more than 200 GPUs in a 1 D domain-decomposition parallelization mode. The overall speed is about 1/11 of the real-time. Optimization of the communication part of the parallel GPU codes can speed up the simulation further, indicating that such real-time simulations have not only methodological but also industrial implications in the near future.
