Distributed Affine Body Dynamics with Adaptive Consensus
For large-scale physics simulation in graphics/robotics, this work enables distributed execution of IPC with guaranteed non-penetration, addressing a key scalability limitation.
The paper tackles the scalability bottleneck of IPC-based Affine Body Dynamics simulation across multiple GPUs/nodes, proposing a distributed consensus ADMM scheme that preserves robustness and non-penetration while enabling efficient scaling.
Affine Body Dynamics (ABD) within the Incremental Potential Contact (IPC) framework provides accurate simulation of extremely stiff solids exhibiting near-rigid behavior, with strict non-penetration guarantees. However, IPC's globally coupled barrier constraints hinder scalable execution across multiple GPUs and compute nodes. We propose a distributed formulation of ABD using a consensus-based ADMM scheme. Each compute node solves its local ABD subproblem in parallel, followed by a global consensus step that enforces consistency among shared boundary bodies. The proposed method preserves IPC-level robustness and global consistency under distributed execution. Experiments demonstrate stable convergence, non-penetration, and efficient scaling on large-scale scenes across multiple nodes.