Modeling and Rendering of Real-time Large-scale Granular Flow Scene on GPU

Real-time large-scale granular flow scene simulation has become a challenging task because massive amounts of geometric and graphical computation need to be rapidly processed. The paper presents a new simulation method that compute Discrete Element Method (DEM) entirely on GPU. To achieve this goal, Spatial subdivision algorithm is firstly proposed to partition space into a uniform grid, we also propose parallel radix sort algorithm and then sort the particles based on their hash values. With the above methods, we can effectively increase speed for searching neighboring particles and interacting with boundaries. To reach the requirement of real-time simulation of large-scale granular flow based on the Discrete Element Method (DEM), the implementation is made with the NVIDIA Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). The experimental results show that the method proposed not only can simulate large-scale granular flow scene in real-time, but can simulate various kinds of granular flow behaviors in real-time by adjusting the very few experimental parameters.