Large-Scale Parallel Multibody Dynamics with Frictional Contact on the Graphical Processing Unit

In the context of simulating the frictional contact dynamics of large systems of rigid bodies, this paper reviews a novel method for solving large cone complementarity problems by means of a fixed-point iteration algorithm. The method is an extension of the Gauss-Seidel and Gauss-Jacobi methods with overrelaxation for symmetric convex linear complementarity problems. Convergent under fairly standard assumptions, the method is implemented in a parallel framework by using a single instruction multiple data computation paradigm promoted by the Compute Unified Device Architecture library for graphical processing unit programming. The framework supports the simulation of problems with more than 1 million bodies in contact. Simulation thus becomes a viable tool for investigating the dynamics of complex systems such as ground vehicles running on sand, powder composites, and granular material flow.