Metallic Foam Structures, Dendrites and Implementation Optimizations for Phase-Field Modeling

Abstract

We present our current work in the field of computational materials science with the phase-field method on the high performance cluster XC 4000 of the KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology). Our investigations include heat conduction of open cell metal foams, dendritic growth and optimizations of the concurrent processing with the message passing interface (MPI) standard. Large scale simulations are applied to identify relevant parameters of heat conduction and dendrite growth. Our overall goal is to continuously develop our models, numerical solution techniques and software implementations. The basic model and parallelization scheme is described. Disadvantages of 1D domain decomposition compared to 3D domain decomposition for large 3D simulation domains are explained and a detailed analysis of the new 3D decomposition needs to be performed. The data throughput of parallel file IO operations is measured and system specific differences have been found which need further investigations.