Cyclic Parallel Discrete Element Method for Soil-wheel Interaction Analysis

To develop a practical and fast analysis tool for interaction studies of soil-wheel system, the algorithm of our two-dimensional discrete element method (DEM) program was modified, and a simple parallelization method, either cyclic division or block-cyclic division, was introduced at the elemental loop. The developed parallel DEM program was found to be sufficiently accurate. The application of the cyclic division method was not effective when executed on a clustered 4-CPU system with the current number of DEs. Both divisions were found to be effective when executed on a PC with multi-core CPUs with shared L2 cache memory, and the possible range of block width in the block-cyclic division method was from 1 to 8.