Micromechanical simulation of geotechnical problems using massively parallel supercomputers

This paper demonstrates that the architecture of a massively parallel supercomputers can be adapted for micromechanical simulations of geotechnical problems, if the correct architecture and computer algorithms are used. The Discrete Element Method (DEM) was used on a Connection Machine (CM-5), a massively parallel supercomputer with 512 nodes, to simulate geotechnical boundary value problems. For the demonstration, two triaxial test were simulated using an algorithm entitled 'TRUBAL for Parallel Machines (TPM)' based on the Discrete Element Method. In this trial demonstration, the inherent parallelism within DEM algorithms is shown for a Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) approach. Then a comparison is made between the parallel algorithm (TPM) and the serial algorithm (TRUBAL) to show the benefits of this research. TPM performed this simulation nine times faster than TRUBAL.