The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis
Scalable Asynchronous Contact Mechanics with Charm++.
Student: Xiang Ni (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Supervisor: Laxmikant Kale (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Abstract: This poster presents a scalable implementation of the Asynchronous Contact Mechanics (ACM) algorithm, a reliable method to simulate flexible material subject to complex collisions and contact geometries, e.g. cloth simulation in animation. The parallelization of ACM is challenging due to its highly irregular communication pattern, requirement for dynamic load balancing, and extremely fine-grained computations. We make use of Charm++, an adaptive parallel runtime system, to address these challenges and scale ACM to 384 cores for problems with less than 100k vertices. By comparison the previously published shared memory implementation only scales well to about 30 cores. We demonstrate the scalability of our implementation through a number of challenging examples. In particular, for a simulation of a cylindrical rod twisting within a cloth sheet, the simulation time is reduced by 12× from 9 hours on 30 cores to 46 minutes using our implementation on 384 cores of a Cray XC30.
