The stability of a dense granular assembly can be greatly reduced by a pore pressure of the interstitial fluid, and the body may fail and transit from a solid-like state to a fluid-like state. This process involves two major problems: large deformation and hydro-mechanical coupling. In this work, a three-dimensional fully coupled hydro-mechanical model using material point method (MPM) is developed. Darcy's law, considering the inertial effect, is adopted to govern the motion of interstitial water, and the conservation of momentum of the mixture is used to govern the motion of the solid, i.e., granular materials. The spatial discretization schemes for these equations are derived using the generalized integration material point method (GIMP), and the proposed coupled MPM formulation is implemented in a three-dimensional numerical code. The developed model is first quantitatively validated by comparing the simulation results of temporal evolution of spatial distribution of hydraulic pressure in a one-dimensional oedometer test with the analytical results. An experiment is designed to observe the failure of a saturated sand pile, in which the partial-saturated region is avoided by increasing the hydraulic head at the input boundary, and the kinetic energy of water is dissipated by a filtering cloth. The failure process is simulated with the MPM code. It is found that the location of the shear band in the simulation agrees with the location of the sliding surface in the experiment. The temporal evolutions of the spatial distributions of hydraulic pressure and the solid velocity distribution at a specific time are given to provide insight into the mechanism of the failure process. This work would be helpful in understanding the initiation mechanism of debris flows induced by rainfall, and sand production in gas hydrate-bearing sediments due to increasing fluid content associated with hydrate dissociation. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.