Billion Degree-of-Freedom Granular Dynamics Simulation on Commodity Hardware

Author(s):  
Conlain Kelly ◽  
Nicholas Olsen ◽  
Dan Negrut

Abstract This study describes the implementation of a granular dynamics solver designed to run on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). The discussion concentrates on how the Discrete Element Method (DEM) has been mapped onto the GPU architecture, the software design decisions involved in the process, and the optimizations allowed by those decisions. This solver, called Chrono::Granular, has been developed as a standalone library that can interface with other dynamics engines via triangle mesh co-simulation. A scaling analysis of the code presented herein demonstrates linear scaling with problem sizes of over two billion degrees of freedom and closing in on one billion bodies. We conclude with a study of hourglass (or hopper) mass discharge rate which compares the solver to experimental results and investigates a process for determining empirical coefficients of flow rate through simulation.

Author(s):  
Subhajit Sanfui ◽  
Deepak Sharma

Abstract This paper presents an efficient strategy to perform the assembly stage of finite element analysis (FEA) on general-purpose graphics processing units (GPU). This strategy involves dividing the assembly task by using symbolic and numeric kernels, and thereby reducing the complexity of the standard single-kernel assembly approach. Two sparse storage formats based on the proposed strategy are also developed by modifying the existing sparse storage formats with the intention of removing the degrees of freedom-based redundancies in the global matrix. The inherent problem of race condition is resolved through the implementation of coloring and atomics. The proposed strategy is compared with the state-of-the-art GPU-based and CPU-based assembly techniques. These comparisons reveal a significant number of benefits in terms of reducing storage space requirements and execution time and increasing performance (GFLOPS). Moreover, using the proposed strategy, it is found that the coloring method is more effective compared to the atomics-based method for the existing as well as the modified storage formats.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel C. Gill ◽  
David Mobley

<div>Sampling multiple binding modes of a ligand in a single molecular dynamics simulation is difficult. A given ligand may have many internal degrees of freedom, along with many different ways it might orient itself a binding site or across several binding sites, all of which might be separated by large energy barriers. We have developed a novel Monte Carlo move called Molecular Darting (MolDarting) to reversibly sample between predefined binding modes of a ligand. Here, we couple this with nonequilibrium candidate Monte Carlo (NCMC) to improve acceptance of moves.</div><div>We apply this technique to a simple dipeptide system, a ligand binding to T4 Lysozyme L99A, and ligand binding to HIV integrase in order to test this new method. We observe significant increases in acceptance compared to uniformly sampling the internal, and rotational/translational degrees of freedom in these systems.</div>


Author(s):  
Steven J. Lind ◽  
Benedict D. Rogers ◽  
Peter K. Stansby

This paper presents a review of the progress of smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) towards high-order converged simulations. As a mesh-free Lagrangian method suitable for complex flows with interfaces and multiple phases, SPH has developed considerably in the past decade. While original applications were in astrophysics, early engineering applications showed the versatility and robustness of the method without emphasis on accuracy and convergence. The early method was of weakly compressible form resulting in noisy pressures due to spurious pressure waves. This was effectively removed in the incompressible (divergence-free) form which followed; since then the weakly compressible form has been advanced, reducing pressure noise. Now numerical convergence studies are standard. While the method is computationally demanding on conventional processors, it is well suited to parallel processing on massively parallel computing and graphics processing units. Applications are diverse and encompass wave–structure interaction, geophysical flows due to landslides, nuclear sludge flows, welding, gearbox flows and many others. In the state of the art, convergence is typically between the first- and second-order theoretical limits. Recent advances are improving convergence to fourth order (and higher) and these will also be outlined. This can be necessary to resolve multi-scale aspects of turbulent flow.


2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Goran Flegar ◽  
Hartwig Anzt ◽  
Terry Cojean ◽  
Enrique S. Quintana-Ortí

The use of mixed precision in numerical algorithms is a promising strategy for accelerating scientific applications. In particular, the adoption of specialized hardware and data formats for low-precision arithmetic in high-end GPUs (graphics processing units) has motivated numerous efforts aiming at carefully reducing the working precision in order to speed up the computations. For algorithms whose performance is bound by the memory bandwidth, the idea of compressing its data before (and after) memory accesses has received considerable attention. One idea is to store an approximate operator–like a preconditioner–in lower than working precision hopefully without impacting the algorithm output. We realize the first high-performance implementation of an adaptive precision block-Jacobi preconditioner which selects the precision format used to store the preconditioner data on-the-fly, taking into account the numerical properties of the individual preconditioner blocks. We implement the adaptive block-Jacobi preconditioner as production-ready functionality in the Ginkgo linear algebra library, considering not only the precision formats that are part of the IEEE standard, but also customized formats which optimize the length of the exponent and significand to the characteristics of the preconditioner blocks. Experiments run on a state-of-the-art GPU accelerator show that our implementation offers attractive runtime savings.


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