Large Scale 3D Multi-Phase-Field Simulation of Microstructure Evolution Using TSUBAME2.5 GPU-Supercomputer

The multi-phase-field (MPF) method has attracted attention as a very promising tool for simulating microstructure evolutions in polycrystalline materials. However, because of the heavy computational cost incurred by three-dimensional (3D) MPF simulations, simulating realistic microstructure morphology in three dimensions has been difficult. In our research, we developed a multiple-GPU computing technique and an overlapping method that facilitate efficient 3D MPF simulations. Using the technique developed, we performed 3D MPF simulations of polycrystalline grain growth on a GPU-cluster and on the TSUBAME2.5 supercomputer at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. The results obtained indicate that our multiple-GPUs computing technique combined with the overlapping method significantly reduce the elapsed time of simulations and easily facilitate the performance of very large-scale 3D simulations with up to 10243 computational grids.