The performance analysis of the thermal discrete element method computations on the GPU

Abstract

The paper presents a GPU implementation of the thermal discrete el-ement method (TDEM) and the comparative analysis of its performance. Seve-ral discrete element models for granular flows, the bonded particle model and theTDEM are considered for quantitative comparison of computational performance.The performance measured on NVIDIA®Tesla™P100 GPU is compared with thatattained by running the same OpenCL code on Intel®Xeon™E5-2630 CPU with20 cores. The presented GPU implementation of the TDEM increases the com-puting time of the bonded particle model only up to 30.6 % of the computing timeof the simplest DEM model, which is an acceptable decrease in the performancerequired for solving coupled thermomechanical problems.