Open-Source Software for Granular Rigid Body Simulation
The Granular Rigid Body Simulation Framework developed by Gabriel Nützi, former doctoral student in Prof. Christoph Glocker's group, during his Phd thesis to simulate large-scale non-smooth rigid body dynamics.
During the studies of granular media in the context of chute flows arising from experiments in the field of snow and avalanche research, there was need to be able to simulate millions of rigid bodies interacting with each other. The GRSFramework provides efficient and rigorous tools to simulate granular non-smooth dynamics in parallel on a high-performance clusters. Furthmore, several tools have been developped which allows to compare experiments of granular flows with simulations. These include data extraction and analysis , 3d rendering of large-scale rigid body simulations and image correlation tasks.
The GRSFramework may server as a starting point for other researchers working in any field related to granular dynamics with the goal to contribute and reuse the source code.
The GRSFramework is accompanied by the ApproxMVBB (external page https://github.com/gabyx/ApproxMVBB) library and the HPCJobConfigurator (external page http://gabyx.github.io/HPCJobConfigurator) tool.
The ApproxMVBB library provides an efficient implementation for approximate minimal bounding box and kd-tree computations which are used for load-balancing tasks in the GRSFramework.
The HPCJobConfigurator eases the handling of parallel jobs for computations on high-performance clusters and provides a clean and structured workflow for configuring and launching large-scale computations on clusters with the ability to test them on a local workstation beforehand.
Framework:external page http://gabyx.github.io/GRSFramework
More videos available at external page http://gabyx.github.io/GRSFramework/#videos
