Micro-mechanical Simulations of Soils using Massively Parallel Supercomputers

In this research a computer program, Trubal version 1.51, based on the Discrete Element Method was converted to run on a Connection Machine (CM-5),a massively parallel supercomputer with 512 nodes, to expedite the computational times of simulating Geotechnical boundary value problems. The dynamic memory algorithm in Trubal program did not perform efficiently in CM-2 machine with the Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) architecture. This was due to the communication overhead involving global array reductions, global array broadcast and random data movement. Therefore, a dynamic memory algorithm in Trubal program was converted to a static memory arrangement and Trubal program was successfully converted to run on CM-5 machines. The converted program was called "TRUBAL for Parallel Machines (TPM)." Simulating two physical triaxial experiments and comparing simulation results with Trubal simulations validated the TPM program. With a 512 nodes CM-5 machine TPM produced a nine-fold speedup demonstrating the inherent parallelism within algorithms based on the Discrete Element Method