A Preliminary Study of Using Graphic Processors on Discrete Element Method Computation

• Main Authors: Shou-Yu Lin, 林壽佑
• Other Authors: Yo-Ming Hsieh
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/99687779954571171559

碩士 === 國立臺灣科技大學 === 營建工程系 === 96 === 　　Discrete-element method (DEM) is a simulation method that has many potential applications in civil-engineering such as rock-fall, sand behaviors, etc. However, DEM currently has little practical applications due to its computational requirements. Realistic DEM simulations often involves thousands of discrete objects and requires many time increments. Therefore, in order to reduce overall computation time for DEM simulations, a object-oriented code written in C++ is developed in this work to incorporate graphics processing units (GPU) in discrete-element simulations. GPUs are specialized processors for graphics-processing, but has been adopted for general-purpose computing in recent years for their superior floating-point calculation capabilities than general-purpose central processing units. 　　In this study, in order to ensure the developed code can be extended and maintained easily, design patters in object-oriented programming are utilized to develop a DEM software framework. The developed software framework is then implemented using C++ programming language, and then performance-profiled to identify the bottleneck in a DEM simulation. The identified bottleneck code is then modified to incorporate GPU computation using CUDA. Finally, by using the developed code, the 1) performance, 2) results between different contact-detection methods or using different processors, and 3) single-precision versus double-precision were evaluated. Finally, some recommendations on using GPU for DEM simulations were discussed.