Abstract:
Understanding the dynamical behavior of Granular Media (GM) is extremely important to
many industrial processes. Thus simulating the dynamics of GMis critical in the design and
optimization of such processes. However, the dynamics of GM is complex in nature and
cannot be described by a closed form solution for more than a few particles. A popular and
successful approach in simulating the underlying dynamics of GM is by using the Discrete
Element Method (DEM). Computational viable simulations are typically restricted to a few
particles with realistic complex interactions or a larger number of particles with simplified
interactions. This paper introduces a novel DEM based particle simulation code (BLAZEDEM)
that is capable of simulating millions of particles on a desktop computer utilizing a
NVIDIA Kepler Graphical Processor Unit (GPU) via the CUDA programming model. The GPU
framework of BLAZE-DEM is limited to applications that require large numbers of particles
with simplified interactions such as hopper flow which exhibits task level parallelism
that can be exploited on the GPU. BLAZE-DEM also performs real-time visualization with
interactive capabilities. In this paper we discuss our GPU framework and validate our code
by comparison between experimental and numerical hopper flow.
