A study on the influence of the particle packing fraction on the performance of a multilevel contact detection algorithm

We investigate the influence of the packing fraction of highly polydisperse particle systems on the performance of a high-performance multilevel contact detection algorithm as applied for molecular dynamics type simulations. For best performance, this algorithm requires two or more hierarchy levels in order to cope with the strongly different particle size classes. In order to predict the optimal number of levels, an empirical parameter corresponding to the “overhead” is identified. For homogeneous systems, the density is not much affecting the performance of the algorithm, however, the optimal number of levels slightly increases with density as well as the speed-up as compared to a single-level method