Abstract
The Distinct Element Method (DEM) is a numerical method for the simulation of the behaviour of media consisting of discrete particles, and is widely used for process optimisation in the food and pharmaceutical industries. The DEM is very computationally expensive, but has properties that make it amenable to acceleration by reconfigurable computing. This paper presents the design of an implementation of the DEM in FPGA hardware. Its performance is about 5 times faster than that of a software implementation running on a 1 GHz Athlon processor. The paper discusses how improvements to the design, notably greater use of parallelism, can give a much greater speed advantage.
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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Schafer, B.C., Quigley, S.F., Chan, A.H.C. (2001). Evaluation of an FPGA Implementation of the Discrete Element Method. In: Brebner, G., Woods, R. (eds) Field-Programmable Logic and Applications. FPL 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2147. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44687-7_32
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44687-7_32
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