DEM-Engine issues with demos

[Fabio Marghella]

Hi everyone,

I am a student currently involved in my master's thesis work regarding soft soil.

I'm trying to download and use DEM-Engine following all the passages listed in https://github.com/projectchrono/DEM-Engine (Windows user with CUDA 12.9 and a GPU NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti).

I cloned the repo's main branch using Sourcetree and putting the flag on the recursive option. Then on CMake (version 4.1.1) I made the configuration and generation without any error apparently  (here the screenshot).

After that I built the solution project in Release mode using Visual Studio 2022 without error outputs. As a test I tried to run the demo DEMdemo_SingleSphereCollide.exe. The previously linked GitHub says that the output of the simulation should be a series of text lines (no matter what they are) but this does not happen to me. The only output I obtain is the following:

Looking at the original script of the demo in the source folder I can see that some libraries that should be included are not present, like <core/utils/ThreadManager.h>,  <DEM/API.h>, <DEM/HostSideHelpers.hpp>, <DEM/utils/Samplers.hpp>.

Do you have any idea of what could be the problem?

Thank you in advance

[Ruochun Zhang]

Hi Fabio,

First I'd suggest that you let it run for longer. Just-in-time compiling can take a while, so if you stopped the process within 20s or so, assuming there's inactivity, you might have missed the output. Also you can try running it in a command prompt like PowerShell, so that it does not close immediately after finishing.

If you waited long enough and it does freeze there, then you could try two things. Open the demo file and change verbosity to debug (DEMSim.SetVerbosity("DEBUG")), re-compile and re-run and let us see where the freezing happens. Or better, just try compiling and running it in WSL to see if it works. Windows now comes with WSL and installing it is as easy as one line of command. It's likely to work fine in WSL and if not, it's probably about the environment or the hardware.

Thank you,

Ruochun

[Fabio Marghella]

Thank you very much for the quick response. 

As you said I just needed to wait a bit longer, after 5 minutes no outputs were available but after 10 yes.

Thank you again,

Fabio

[Ruochun Zhang]

Hi Fabio,

That's a bit surprising. As there's essentially no compute in this demo, the 10-minute time is probably all spent on CPU-side JIT compiling. Even on ancient systems, I'd say it's too much, and I expect something more like 20 seconds.

It's somewhat impractical to test with this efficiency. If you wish to continue using it, I suggest locating where the biggest overhead is. You can time the Initialize() step to see if it really took 10 minutes; then the script already shows the time spent on actual computing (if they add up to something much less than 10 minutes, then you probably have big delays elsewhere). You can also test on WSL2 Ubuntu to see if it drastically reduces the total time.

Thank you,

Ruochun