A Multi-Core Ready Discrete Element Method With Triangles Using Dynamically Adaptive Multiscale Grids

Krestenitis, K.; Weinzierl, T.

doi:10.1002/cpe.4935

A Multi-Core Ready Discrete Element Method With Triangles Using Dynamically Adaptive Multiscale Grids

Krestenitis, K.; Weinzierl, T.

Authors

K. Krestenitis

Professor Tobias Weinzierl tobias.weinzierl@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Abstract

The simulation of vast numbers of rigid bodies of non‐analytical shapes and of tremendously different sizes that collide with each other is computationally challenging. A bottleneck is the identification of all particle contact points per time step. We propose a tree‐based multilevel meta data structure to administer the particles. The data structure plus a purpose‐made tree traversal identifying the contact points introduce concurrency to the particle comparisons, whilst they keep the absolute number of particle‐to‐particle comparisons low. Furthermore, a novel adaptivity criterion allows explicit time stepping to work with comparably large time steps. It optimises both toward low algorithmic complexity per time step and low numbers of time steps. We study three different parallelisation strategies exploiting our traversal's concurrency. The fusion of two of them yields promising speedups once we rely on maximally asynchronous task‐based realisations. Our work shows that new computer architecture can push the boundary of rigid particle computability, yet if and only if the right data structures and data processing schemes are chosen.

Citation

Krestenitis, K., & Weinzierl, T. (2019). A Multi-Core Ready Discrete Element Method With Triangles Using Dynamically Adaptive Multiscale Grids. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 31(19), Article e4935. https://doi.org/10.1002/cpe.4935

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Jul 10, 2018
Online Publication Date	Aug 31, 2018
Publication Date	Oct 31, 2019
Deposit Date	Jul 15, 2018
Publicly Available Date	Sep 13, 2018
Journal	Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience
Print ISSN	1532-0626
Electronic ISSN	1532-0634
Publisher	Wiley
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	31
Issue	19
Article Number	e4935
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1002/cpe.4935

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Copyright Statement
Advance online version © 2018 The Authors Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.