This benchmark compares the performance of phasicFlow with a well-stablished commercial DEM software for simulating a helical mixer with varying particle counts (250k to 4M particles). The benchmark measures both computational efficiency and memory usage across different hardware configurations.

Summary of Results:

phasicFlow achieves similar performance to the commercial DEM software on the same hardware.
phasicFlow shows a 30% performance improvement when using the NVIDIA RTX A4000 compared to the RTX 4050Ti.
Memory usage is approximately 50% lower in phasicFlow compared to the commercial software, with phasicFlow using about 0.7 GB of memory per million particles, while the commercial software uses about 1.5 GB per million particles.

Simulation Setup

Figure 1. Commercial DEM simulation snapshot

Figure 2. phasicFlow simulation snapshot and visualized using Paraview

Hardware Specifications

Table 1. Hardware specifications used for benchmarking.

System	CPU	GPU	Operating System
Laptop	Intel i9-13900HX 2.2 GHz	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050Ti 6G	Windows 11 24H2
Workstation	Intel Xeon 4210 2.2 GHz	NVIDIA RTX A4000 16G	Ubuntu 22.04

Simulation Parameters

Table 2. Parameters for helical mixer simulations.

Case	Particle Diameter	Particle Count
250k	6 mm	250,000
500k	5 mm	500,000
1M	4 mm	1,000,000
2M	3 mm	2,000,000
4M	2 mm	4,000,000

The time step for all simulations was set to 1.0e-5 seconds and the simulation ran for 7.5 seconds.

Performance Comparison

Execution Time

Table 3. Total calculation time (minutes) for different configurations.

Software	250k	500k	1M	2M	4M
phasicFlow-4050Ti	110 min	215 min	413 min	-	-
Commercial DEM-4050Ti	111 min	210 min	415 min	-	-
phasicFlow-A4000	82 min	150 min	300 min	613 min	1236 min

The execution time scales linearly with particle count. phasicFlow demonstrates approximately:

the computing speed is basically the same as well-established commercial DEM software on the same hardware
30% performance improvement when using the NVIDIA RTX A4000 compared to the RTX 4050Ti

Figure 3. Calculation time comparison between phasicFlow and the well-established commercial DEM software.

Memory Usage

Table 4. Memory consumption for different configurations.

Software	250k	500k	1M	2M	4M
phasicFlow-4050Ti	260 MB	404 MB	710 MB	-	-
Commercial DEM-4050Ti	460 MB	920 MB	1574 MB	-	-
phasicFlow-A4000	352 MB	496 MB	802 MB	1376 MB	2310 MB

Memory efficiency comparison:

phasicFlow uses approximately 0.7 GB of memory per million particles
Commercial DEM software uses approximately 1.5 GB of memory per million particles
phasicFlow shows ~50% lower memory consumption compared to the commercial alternative
The memory usage scales linearly with particle count in both software packages. But due to memory limitations on GPUs, it is possible to run larger simulation on GPUs with phasicFlow.

Run Your Own Benchmarks

The simulation case setup files are available in this folder for users interested in performing similar benchmarks on their own hardware. These files can be used to reproduce the tests and compare performance across different systems.