The major obstacle for the application of discontinuous deformation analysis (DDA) in engineering problems is the high computational cost and poor efficiency. In this paper, the main algorithms of disk‐based DDA are redesigned and implemented on graphics processing unit (GPU) to improve its performance. First, a contact pair‐wise scheme is proposed to assemble the stiffness matrix on GPU. Second, a buffer strategy and a GPU version of grid‐based contact detection algorithm are developed to improve the efficiency of contact detection. Third, for solving the simultaneous equations, two iterative methods are considered along with the direct solver method. The parallel performances of proposed strategies are tested and compared with the CPU counterparts. The results show that the maximum speedup ratio is 14 for the assembly of the stiffness matrix and 215 for contact detection. The speedup ratio for solving simultaneous equations depends on several factors, and the preconditioned conjugate gradients method (pcg) is suggested. Finally, the effectiveness and performance of the proposed GPU accelerated disk‐based DDA is further demonstrated by several examples, one of which consisted of over 500,000 particles. The results show that the proposed method can achieve a satisfactory speedup ratio, and is ready for large‐scale problems.

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