Accelerated Simulation of Sphere Packings Using Parallel Hardware

The simulation of dry particle packings and their geometrical properties is of great importance to material sciences. Substantial acceleration of the simulation can be obtained using parallel hardware (GPU), but this requires specialized data structures and algorithms. We present a parallel version of the so-called collective rearrangement algorithm that allows to simulate random close packings of up to several million spherical particles from an arbitrary particle size distribution. The empirical time complexity of our implementation is almost linear in the number of spheres.