Publication Abstract

Large-scale Parallel Lattice Boltzmann - Cellular Automaton Model of Two-dimensional Dendritic Growth

Jelinek, B., Eshraghi, M., Felicelli, S. D., & Peters, J. F. (2013). Large-scale Parallel Lattice Boltzmann - Cellular Automaton Model of Two-dimensional Dendritic Growth. Computer Physics Communications. Elsevier. 185(3), 939-947. DOI:10.1016/j.cpc.2013.09.013.

Abstract

A lattice Boltzmann - cellular automaton model for simulations of two-dimensional (2D) dendritic solidification in large domains has been developed. The model incorporates effects of phase change, solute diffusion, melt convection, and heat transport. The computer program was parallelized using MPI technique. Parallel scaling of the algorithm was studied and major scalability bottlenecks were identified. Efficiency loss attributable to the high memory bandwidth requirement of the algorithm was observed when using multiple cores per processor. Parallel writing of the output variables of interest was implemented in the binary Hierarchical Data Format 5 (HDF5) to improve the output performance, and to simplify visualization. Calculations were carried out in single precision arithmetic without significant loss in accuracy, resulting in 50% reduction of memory and computational time requirements. The presented solidification model shows a very good scalability up to centimeter size domains, including more than ten million of dendrites.