A massively parallel spatially resolved stochastic cluster dynamics method for simulations of irradiated materials
Description
The spatially resolved stochastic cluster dynamics (SRSCD) method is one of the most important methods for simulating the time-evolution of spatially correlated microstructures in irradiated materials. It is a kinetic Monte Carlo-based method for stochastically evolving integer-valued populations of defects within multi finite volume elements according to reaction rates. However, the increasing spatial scale and complexity of the simulated systems have exceeded the capabilities of serial SRSCD. To extend SRSCD to simulate large-scale complex systems, we propose a massively parallel SRSCD method in this paper and implement the program named MISA-SLSCD. It contains four contributions: (1) a dynamic Defect-Reaction Tree data structure to efficiently store and update millions of defect species and reactions; (2) a double-grouping search strategy to speed up the search for defects and reactions; (3) an adaptive synchronous algorithm to balance the accuracy and efficiency of simulations; and (4) an on-demand communication strategy to eliminate communication redundancy. A series of numerical simulation results show that our method has high accuracy in simulating damage accumulation in irradiated materials and obtains a good performance of over 90% parallel efficiency on 32, 000 CPU cores with a 32 million-volume-element system.