Quasi-real-time simulation of rotating drum using discrete element method with parallel GPU computing--颗粒学报PARTICUOLOGY

Xu, J., Qi, H., Fang, X., Lu, L., Ge, W., Wang, X., Xu, M., Chen, F., He, X., & Li, J. (2011). Quasi-real-time simulation of rotating drum using discrete element method with parallel GPU computing. Multiscale Modeling and Simulation of Complex Particulate Systems, 9(4), 446–450. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.partic.2011.01.003

Quasi-real-time simulation of rotating drum using discrete element method with parallel GPU computing

Ji Xu ^{a b}, Huabiao Qi ^{a b}, Xiaojian Fang ^{a b}, Liqiang Lu ^{a b}, Wei Ge ^a *, Xiaowei Wang ^a, Ming Xu ^a, Feiguo Chen ^a, Xianfeng He ^a, Jinghai Li ^a

a State Key Laboratory of Multiphase Complex Systems, Institute of Process Engineering (IPE), Chinese Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 353, Beijing 100190, China
b Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100039, China

10.1016/j.partic.2011.01.003

Volume 9, Issue 4, August 2011, Pages 446-450

Received 31 August 2010, Revised 23 November 2010, Accepted 26 January 2011, Available online 1 June 2011.

E-mail: wge@home.ipe.ac.cn

Highlights

Abstract

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 1D 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.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Rotating drum; Real-time; Discrete element method (DEM); Speedup; GPU

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