Accelerating Yade’s poromechanical coupling with matrix factorization reuse, parallel task management, and GPU computing

• Published in: Computer physics communications 2020-03, Vol.248, p.106991, Article 106991
• Main Authors: Caulk, Robert A., Catalano, Emanuele, Chareyre, Bruno
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Acceleration technique; Discrete Element Method; Finite Volume; GPU; Physics; Poroelastic; Yade
• ISSN: 0010-4655; 1879-2944
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cpc.2019.106991

This study details the acceleration techniques and associated performance gains in the time integration of coupled poromechanical problems using the Discrete Element Method (DEM) and a Pore scale Finite Volume (PFV) scheme in Yade open DEM software. Specifically, the model is tailored for accuracy by reducing the frequency of costly matrix factorizations (matrix factor reuse), moving the matrix factorizations to background POSIX threads (multithreaded factorization), factorizing the matrix on a GPU (accelerated factorization), and running PFV pressure and force calculations in parallel to the DEM interaction loop using OpenMP threads (parallel task management). Findings show that these four acceleration techniques combine to accelerate the numerical poroelastic oedometer solution by 170x, which enables more frequent triangulation of large scale time-dependent DEM+PFV simulations (356 thousand+ particles, 2.1 million DOFs). •An open source discrete element based poromechanical coupling is presented.•Four computational acceleration techniques are described and illustrated.•Poromechanical benchmark used to quantify performance for each acceleration method.•Combined, acceleration techniques increase speed of the PFV+DEM by 170x.