Chrono::Gpu is an optional module that enables a GPU solver specialized for simulating large systems of granular materials with a penalty-based Discrete Element Method.

Features

The GPU module allows users to construct a dynamic system consisting of spherical elements

Here are the main features:

a variety of friction models
- frictionless (optimized)
- single-step pseudo history
- multi-step history tracking
a variety of explicit time integrators
- forward Euler
- extended Taylor
- centered difference
- Chung
single-GPU scaling up to 700 million frictionless elements or 200 million full-history frictional elements
trianglular meshes (obj format) in order to facilitate co-simulation with a more full-featured solver (such as the ChSystem)

Requirements

To build applications based on this module you must have CUDA installed
To run applications based on this module you need
- an NVIDIA GPU
- Linux or Windows
This module has been build/tested on both Windows 11 and Linux (Ubuntu 22.04, Fedora 40, and Arch Linux) with CUDA 12.3 and 12.8.

Building instructions

Repeat the instructions for the full installation, but when you see the CMake window, you must add the following steps:
Set the CH_ENABLE_MODULE_GPU as 'on', then press 'Configure' (to refresh the variable list)
Press 'Configure' again, then 'Generate', and proceed as usual in the installation instructions.

How to use it

Look at the API section of this module for documentation about classes and functions.
Look at the C++ source of demos to learn how to use the functions of this module.

MacOS support

This module cannot be built for MacOS, Nvidia GPU hardware and CUDA are unsupported.