Development of a convex polyhedral discrete element simulation framework for NVIDIA Kepler based GPUs

Understanding the dynamical behavior of Granular Media (GM) is extremely important to many industrial processes. Thus simulating the dynamics of GM is 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 (BLAZE-DEM) 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.