The Performance Analysis of the Thermal Discrete Element Method Computations on the GPU

Abstract

The paper presents a GPU implementation of the thermal discrete element method (TDEM) and the comparative analysis of its performance. Several discrete element models for granular flows, the bonded particle model and the TDEM are considered for quantitative comparison of computational performance. The performance measured on NVIDIA(R) Tesla™ P100 GPU is compared with that attained by running the same OpenCL code on Intel(R) Xeon™ E5-2630 CPU with 20 cores. The presented GPU implementation of the TDEM increases the computing time of the bonded particle model only up to 30.6 % of the computing time of the simplest DEM model, which is an acceptable decrease in the performance required for solving coupled thermomechanical problems.