Massively parallel rigid body dynamics simulations

For decades, rigid body dynamics has been used in several active research fields to simulate the behavior of completely undeformable, rigid bodies. Due to the focus of the simulations to either high physical accuracy or real time environments, the state-of-the-art algorithms cannot be used in excess of several thousand rigid bodies. Either the complexity of the algorithms would result in infeasible runtimes, or the simulation could no longer satisfy the real time aspects. In this paper we present a novel approach for large-scale rigid body dynamics simulations. The presented algorithm enables for the first time rigid body simulations of several million rigid bodies. We describe in detail the parallel rigid body algorithm and its necessary extensions for a large-scale MPI parallelization and analyze the parallel algorithm by means of a particular simulation scenario.