Development of 2-D Hybrid FEM/DEM Method Code Using GPGPU

This paper introduces the Y-HFDEM code based on two-dimensional combined finite-discrete-element method (FEM/DEM) for numerical simulation of fracturing process in brittle and semi-brittle materials including rocks. The code has been successfully employed to simulate rock breakage under both quasi-static (e.g. uniaxial compression) and dynamic (e.g. rock blasting) loading conditions. However, the most challenging part in the application of the original Y-HFDEM code was its simulation time required to solve large-scale problems with massive number of nodes, elements and contact interactions. To overcome this limitation, this paper demonstrates the application of GPGPU (General Purpose Graphic Processing Unit) and CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) C/C++ to parallelize the original sequential 2-D Y-HFDEM code along with related numerical algorithms using the GPGPU. Obtained results from verification examples demonstrate the capability of the proposed Y-HFDEM code in modelling larger scale problems in which massive computational effort is required.