Simulation of Massive Multibody Systems

Abstract

We describe an efficient method for the simulation of complex scenarios with millions of frictional contacts and mechanical constraints. To this end, the GPU processors of the modern graphic boards are used to solve the differential inclusion problem that represents the most challenging part of the multi–rigid–body problem. Thank to the massive parallelism offered by GPU boards, we are able to simulate sand, granular materials, soils and other complex physical scenarios with a large speedup respect to serial CPU–based algorithms.