A parallel simulator for multibody systems based on group equations

Multibody systems consist of a set of components connected through some joints, where the movement of the system is determined by those of its components. Their design is computationally demanding, and the group equations formulation facilitates the application of parallelism to reduce the simulation time. A simulator for the kinematic analysis of multibody systems on up-to-date computational nodes (multicore $$\hbox {CPU}+\hbox {GPU}$$CPU+GPU) is presented. The movement of the components is simulated by repeatedly solving independent linear systems working on sparse matrices. The appropriate selection of the linear algebra library to be used and the degree of parallelism at each level (explicit with OpenMP and implicit with multithread libraries) help obtain important reductions in the simulation time.