A parallel version of the non smooth contact dynamics algorithm applied to the simulation of granular media

The NSCD method has shown its efficiency in the simulation of granular media. Since the number of particles and contact increases, the shape of the discrete elements becomes more complicated and the simulated problems becomes more complex, the numerical tools need to be improved in order to preserve reasonable elapsed CPU time. In this paper we present a parallelization approach of the NSCD algorithm and we investigate its influence on the numerical behaviour of the method. We illustrate the efficiency on an example made of hard disks: a free surface compaction.