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

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 CPU 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 10 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. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Chinese Society of Particuology and Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences.