A High Performance Computing Framework for Physics-based Modeling and Simulation of Military Ground Vehicles

This paper describes a software infrastructure made up of tools and libraries designed to assist developers in implementing computational dynamics applications running on heterogeneous and distributed computing environments. Together, these tools and libraries compose a so called Heterogeneous Computing Template HCT. The heterogeneous and distributed computing hardware infrastructure is assumed herein to be made up of a combination of CPUs and Graphics Processing Units GPUs. The computational dynamics applications targeted to execute on such a hardware topology include many-body dynamics, smoothed-particle hydrodynamics SPH fluid simulation, and fluid-solid interaction analysis. The underlying theme of the solution approach embraced by HCT is that of partitioning the domain of interest into a number of subdomains that are each managed by a separate coreaccelerator CPUGPU pair. Five components at the core of HCT enable the envisioned distributed computing approach to large-scale dynamical system simulation a the ability to partition the problem according to the one-to-one mapping i.e., spatial subdivision, discussed above pre-processing b a protocol for passing data between any two co-processors c algorithms for element proximity computation and d the ability to carry out post-processing in a distributed fashion. In this contribution the components a and b of the HCT are demonstrated via the example of the Discrete Element Method DEM for rigid body dynamics with friction and contact. The collision detection task required in frictional-contact dynamics i.e., task c above, is discussed separately and in the context of GPU computing. This task is shown to benefit of a two order of magnitude gain in efficiency when compared to traditional sequential implementations.