GPU-Based Parallel Computing for the Simulation of Complex Multibody Systems with Unilateral and Bilateral Constraints: An Overview

Abstract

This work reports on advances in large-scale multibody dynamics simulation facilitated by the use of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). A description of the GPU execution model along with its memory spaces is provided to illustrate its potential parallel scientific computing. The equations of motion associated with the dynamics of large system of rigid bodies are introduced and a solution method is presented. The solution method is designed to map well on the parallel hardware, which is demonstrated by an order of magnitude reductions in simulation time for large systems that concern the dynamics of granular material. One of the salient attributes of the solution method is its linear scaling with the dimension of the problem. This is due to efficient algorithms that handle in linear time both the collision detection and the solution of the nonlinear complementarity problem associated with the proposed approach. The current implementation supports the simulation of systems with more than one million bodies on commodity desktops. Efforts are under way to extend this number to hundreds of millions of bodies on small affordable clusters.

An adaptive hierarchical domain decomposition method for parallel contact dynamics simulations of granular materials

“…Parallelization of the FFD method is straightforward and efficient [25,26], on the other hand, the parallel version suffers also from the undesired approximations. The parallel implementation of the CCP algorithm by the use of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for large-scale multibody dynamics simulations is presented in [27]. In the present work we investigate the impact of the parallelization on the numerical solution of the CD method going beyond [25,26,27].Providing a parallel CD code is motivated by the need for large-scale simulations of dense granular systems of hard particles.…”

“…The parallel implementation of the CCP algorithm by the use of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for large-scale multibody dynamics simulations is presented in [27]. In the present work we investigate the impact of the parallelization on the numerical solution of the CD method going beyond [25,26,27].Providing a parallel CD code is motivated by the need for large-scale simulations of dense granular systems of hard particles. The computation time even scales as O(N 1+2/d ) with the number of particles in CD [8] (d is the dimension of the system), while it grows linearly with N in MD.…”

“…The parallel implementation of the CCP algorithm by the use of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for large-scale multibody dynamics simulations is presented in [27]. In the present work we investigate the impact of the parallelization on the numerical solution of the CD method going beyond [25,26,27].…”

Ground Moving Target Imaging Using Ultranarrowband Continuous Wave Synthetic Aperture Radar

“…As compared with [33], the computational complexity of our moving target image reconstruction and velocity estimation method increases roughly by a factor of M 2 if the velocity space is discretized into M × M points. Nonetheless, since M 2 is typically much smaller than the dimensions of the reflectivity image, the method can be implemented efficiently by using fast backprojection algorithms [42], [43], or fast Fourier integral operator computation methods [32], [44], and by utilizing parallel processing on graphics processing units [45], [46].…”

Using Krylov subspace and spectral methods for solving complementarity problems in many‐body contact dynamics simulation

“…All numerical experiments include a projected variant of the Jacobi solver as the reference solver. The reference solver choice is motivated by the observation that the Jacobi solver, unlike the marginally more efficient Gauss-Seidel approach, is more amenable to parallel computing; see, for instance, [4,[55][56][57]. For each test, a Chrono::Engine simulation was run in which a collection of spheres was allowed to settle within a fixed boundary.…”