OpenFPM: A scalable environment for particle and particle-mesh codes on parallel computers

Scalable and efficient numerical simulations continue to gain importance, as computation is firmly established tool of discovery, together with theory and experiment. Meanwhile, the performance of computing hardware grows with increasing heterogeneous hardware, enabling simulations of ever more complex models. However, efficiently implementing scalable codes on heterogeneous, distributed hardware systems becomes the bottleneck. This bottleneck can be alleviated by intermediate software layers that provide higher-level abstractions closer to the problem domain, hence allowing the computational scientist to focus on the simulation. Here, we present OpenFPM, an open and scalable framework that provides an abstraction layer for numerical simulations using particles and/or meshes. OpenFPM provides transparent and scalable infrastructure for shared-memory and distributed-memory implementations of particles-only and hybrid particle-mesh simulations of both discrete and continuous models, as well as non-simulation codes. This infrastructure is complemented with frequently used numerical routines, as well as interfaces to third-party libraries. This thesis will present the architecture and design of OpenFPM, detail the underlying abstractions, and benchmark the framework in applications ranging from Smoothed-Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) to Molecular Dynamics (MD), Discrete Element Methods (DEM), Vortex Methods, stencil codes, high-dimensional Monte Carlo sampling (CMA-ES), and Reaction-Diffusion solvers, comparing it to the current state of the art and existing software frameworks

Mobile Robots

The objective of this book is to cover advances of mobile robotics and related technologies applied for multi robot systems' design and development. Design of control system is a complex issue, requiring the application of information technologies to link the robots into a single network. Human robot interface becomes a demanding task, especially when we try to use sophisticated methods for brain signal processing. Generated electrophysiological signals can be used to command different devices, such as cars, wheelchair or even video games. A number of developments in navigation and path planning, including parallel programming, can be observed. Cooperative path planning, formation control of multi robotic agents, communication and distance measurement between agents are shown. Training of the mobile robot operators is very difficult task also because of several factors related to different task execution. The presented improvement is related to environment model generation based on autonomous mobile robot observations

Multibody dynamics 2015

This volume contains the full papers accepted for presentation at the ECCOMAS Thematic Conference on Multibody Dynamics 2015 held in the Barcelona School of Industrial Engineering, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, on June 29 - July 2, 2015. The ECCOMAS Thematic Conference on Multibody Dynamics is an international meeting held once every two years in a European country. Continuing the very successful series of past conferences that have been organized in Lisbon (2003), Madrid (2005), Milan (2007), Warsaw (2009), Brussels (2011) and Zagreb (2013); this edition will once again serve as a meeting point for the international researchers, scientists and experts from academia, research laboratories and industry working in the area of multibody dynamics. Applications are related to many fields of contemporary engineering, such as vehicle and railway systems, aeronautical and space vehicles, robotic manipulators, mechatronic and autonomous systems, smart structures, biomechanical systems and nanotechnologies. The topics of the conference include, but are not restricted to: Formulations and Numerical Methods, Efficient Methods and Real-Time Applications, Flexible Multibody Dynamics, Contact Dynamics and Constraints, Multiphysics and Coupled Problems, Control and Optimization, Software Development and Computer Technology, Aerospace and Maritime Applications, Biomechanics, Railroad Vehicle Dynamics, Road Vehicle Dynamics, Robotics, Benchmark Problems. The conference is organized by the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) in Barcelona. The organizers would like to thank the authors for submitting their contributions, the keynote lecturers for accepting the invitation and for the quality of their talks, the awards and scientific committees for their support to the organization of the conference, and finally the topic organizers for reviewing all extended abstracts and selecting the awards nominees.Postprint (published version