(TOG/SIGGRAPH 2020) Hierarchical Optimization Time Integration for CFL-Rate MPM Stepping

Xinlei Wang*, Minchen Li*, Yu Fang, Xinxin Zhang, Ming Gao, Min Tang,
Danny M. Kaufman, and Chenfanfu Jiang. 2020. Hierarchical Optimization
Time Integration for CFL-Rate MPM Stepping. ACM Trans. Graph. 39, 3,
Article 21 (April 2020), 16 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3386760 (*equal contributions)

We propose Hierarchical Optimization Time Integration (HOT) for efficient implicit timestepping of the material point method (MPM) irrespective of simulated materials and conditions. HOT is an MPM-specialized hierarchical optimization algorithm that solves nonlinear timestep problems for large-scale MPM systems near the CFL limit. HOT provides convergent simulations out of the box across widely varying materials and computational resolutions without parameter tuning. As an implicit MPM timestepper accelerated by a custom-designed Galerkin multigrid wrapped in a quasi-Newton solver, HOT is both highly parallelizable and robustly convergent. As we show in our analysis, HOT maintains consistent and efficient performance even as we grow stiffness, increase deformation, and vary materials over a wide range of finite strain, elastodynamic, and plastic examples. Through careful benchmark ablation studies, we compare the effectiveness of HOT against seemingly plausible alternative combinations of MPM with standard multigrid and other Newton-Krylov models. We show how these alternative designs result in severe issues and poor performance. In contrast, HOT outperforms existing state-of-the-art, heavily optimized implicit MPM codes with an up to 10× performance speedup across a wide range of challenging benchmark test simulations.