S. Plimpton et al., PARALLEL TRANSIENT DYNAMICS SIMULATIONS - ALGORITHMS FOR CONTACT DETECTION AND SMOOTHED PARTICLE HYDRODYNAMICS, Journal of parallel and distributed computing, 50(1-2), 1998, pp. 104-122
Citations number
22
Categorie Soggetti
Computer Science Theory & Methods","Computer Science Theory & Methods
Transient dynamics simulations are commonly used to model phenomena su
ch as car crashes, underwater explosions, and the response of shipping
containers to high-speed impacts. Physical objects in such a simulati
on are typically represented by Lagrangian meshes because the meshes c
an move and deform with the objects as they undergo stress. Fluids (ga
soline, water) or fluid-like materials (soil) in the simulation can be
modeled using the techniques of smoothed particle hydrodynamics. Impl
ementing a hybrid mesh/particle model on a massively parallel computer
poses several difficult challenges. One challenge is to simultaneousl
y parallelize and load-balance both the mesh and particle portions of
the computation. A second challenge is to efficiently detect the conta
cts that occur within the deforming mesh and between mesh elements and
particles as the simulation proceeds. These contacts impart forces to
the mesh elements and particles which must be computed at each timest
ep to accurately capture the physics of interest. In this paper we des
cribe new parallel algorithms for smoothed particle hydrodynamics and
contact detection which turn out to have several key features in commo
n. Additionally, we describe how to join the new algorithms with tradi
tional parallel finite element techniques to create an integrated part
icle/mesh transient dynamics simulation. Our approach to this problem
differs from previous work in that we use three different parallel dec
ompositions, a static one for the finite element analysis and dynamic
ones for particles and for contact detection. We have implemented our
ideas in a parallel version of the transient dynamics code PRONTO-SD a
nd present results for the code running on the Pentium-based Intel Ter
aflop machine at Sandia. (C) 1998 Academic Press.