Dynamical Particle Simulation with Parallel Cache-Aware Domain Decomposition Strategies

The simulation of large particle systems with the Discrete Element Method can be very time consuming. This is due to the necessity for collision detection between the disordered particles. Various methods, originating from different areas such as computer science, are well established and have been used in various applications. For parallel computations the simulation domain needs to be divided into subdomains to be distributed among the different nodes or machines within a supercomputer or a computer-cluster. The strategy for this domain decomposition has a significant influence on the performance of the calculation. In this paper we discuss some aspects of the development of a hierarchical domain decomposition algorithm that provides flexible adaption of the decomposition pattern to the changing structure of the particle system during the simulation. Thus an even load distribution among the different machines can be maintained. Moreover, the same method is also used to deal with the computational bottleneck caused by the presence of unstructured data. (© 2005 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)