Accelerating the Discrete Element Method for Faceted Particles Using HOOMD-Blue

Although studies of static, equilibrium properties of nanoscale anisotropic particles have been highly successful through the use of Metropolis Monte Carlo algorithms, efficient methods of studying kinetic processes such as glassy dynamics and nucleation and growth for anisotropic particles have not been as plentiful. In this talk, we discuss a GPU-accelerated adaptation of the discrete element method to incorporate polyhedral particles into HOOMD-Blue. This formulation allows us to efficiently simulate conservative and nonconservative dynamics of faceted shapes within a classical molecular dynamics framework.