Abstract
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 to several ten 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 massively parallel rigid body dynamics simulations. The presented algorithm enables rigid body simulations of more than one billion interacting rigid bodies on massively parallel supercomputers. We describe in detail the setup of large-scale rigid body simulations, the parallel rigid body algorithm and its communication infrastructure, and analyze the performance of the parallel algorithm by means of a particular simulation scenario.
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Iglberger, K., Rüde, U. Large-scale rigid body simulations. Multibody Syst Dyn 25, 81–95 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11044-010-9212-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11044-010-9212-0