(14a) Large Scale Dem Computation – Expectations and Recent Results

A critical survey is made of current barriers that are hampering the progress of modeling of granular and bulk solid systems and its application to industrial processes. The lack of realism in current simulation can be reduced to mainly four key issues: limitations in systems size, inability to represent realistic particle shapes, contact force models, and experimental difficulties in determining particle physical and geometrical properties of particles and contacts, especially for small particles. It will be argued that, in the absence of any foreseeable dramatic improvements in computational algorithms, large scale distributed computing is the only road to tackle these issues. Next, a short overview will be given of a recent project to parallelize DEMeter++. DEMeter++ is an object oriented software framework for development of efficient particle based simulation codes, like DEM (discrete element modeling) and DPD (dissipative particle dynamics). The parallel version runs on a HPC-cluster with 360 processors. Finally, some results of large scale computations will be shown on silo flow and realistic particle shapes.