Analysis and implementation of the discrete element method using a dedicated highly parallel architecture in reconfigurable computing

Author

Schafer, B. Carrion ; Quigley, S.F. ; Chan, A.H.C.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electron., Electr. & Comput. Eng., Univ. of Birmingham, UK

fYear

2002

fDate

2002

Firstpage

173

Lastpage

181

Abstract

The Discrete Element Method (DEM) is a numerical model to describe the mechanical behaviour of discontinuous bodies. It has been traditionally used to simulate particle flows (e.g. sand, sugar), but is becoming more popular as a method to represent solid materials. The DEM is very computationally expensive, but has properties that make it amenable to acceleration by reconfigurable computing. This paper describes the implementation of a dedicated hardware architecture for the DEM implemented on an FPGA, which is capable of giving a speed-zip of about 30 times compared to an optimised software version running on a fast microprocessor.

Keywords

add-on boards; digital simulation; field programmable gate arrays; finite element analysis; parallel architectures; reconfigurable architectures; DEM; Discrete Element Method; FPGA; complexity; dedicated hardware architecture; discontinuous bodies; highly parallel architecture; reconfigurable computing; solid materials; Acceleration; Computational modeling; Computer architecture; Concurrent computing; Field programmable gate arrays; Hardware; Microprocessors; Numerical models; Parallel architectures; Solid modeling;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines, 2002. Proceedings. 10th Annual IEEE Symposium on

Print_ISBN

0-7695-1801-X

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/FPGA.2002.1106672

Filename

1106672