BMBF Project ParaPhase Started
From 2 to 3 June 2016, the kick-off meeting of the BMBF-funded project "ParaPhase – Raum-zeit-parallele adaptive Simulation von Phasenfeldmodellen auf Höchstleistungsrechnern" took place at JSC, marking the official start of this three-year project. Led by Robert Speck’s group at JSC, the consortium of six German partners targets the development of space-time parallel adaptive algorithms and high-order discretization methods to enable industry-relevant phase-field simulations with unprecedented resolution in space and time.
Phase-field models are an important class of mathematical techniques for the description of a multitude of physical and technical processes. Examples are the modelling of cracks and fracture propagation in solid media like ceramics or dry soil, the representation of liquid phase epitaxy for solar cells, semi-conductors or LEDs, as well as melting and solidification processes of alloys. The broad applicability and mathematical elegance of this approach comes at a cost, namely the significant computing effort required for the simulation of phase-field equations at large scales, demanding the use of modern HPC architectures.
The interdisciplinary consortium consists of two partners with long-standing experience in the particular field of applications (the groups headed by Heike Emmerich at Universität Bayreuth and Christian Miehe at Universität Stuttgart) as well as four partners with a strong background in methods, algorithms and HPC (the groups headed by Carsten Gräser at FU Berlin, Oliver Sander at TU Dresden, Robert Speck at JSC and Jiri Kraus from the NVIDIA Application Lab). While the algorithms developed in this project will be primarily used for studying fracture propagation and liquid phase epitaxy, these problem classes already represent a wide range of challenges in industrial applications. Based on the open-source software DUNE, the "Distributed and Unified Numerics Environment", the resulting algorithms will help to make large-scale HPC simulations accessible for researchers in these fields.
With two post docs and three PhD students fully funded by BMBF, this work will also contribute to educational efforts in the field of computational science and engineering, enabling young scientists to address the challenges of real-world applications with HPC-ready methods and algorithms.
(Contact: Dr. Robert Speck, r.speck@fz-juelich.de)
JSC News No. 242, 16 June 2016