Section: New Software and Platforms
OptiDis
Keywords: Dislocation dynamics simulation - Fast multipole method - Large scale - Collision
Functional Description: OptiDis is a new code for large scale dislocation dynamics simulations. Its purpose is to simulate real life dislocation densities (up to 5.1022 dislocations/m-2) in order to understand plastic deformation and study strain hardening. The main application is to observe and understand plastic deformation of irradiated zirconium. Zirconium alloys are the first containment barrier against the dissemination of radioactive elements. More precisely, with neutron irradiated zirconium alloys we are talking about channeling mechanism, which means to stick with the reality, more than tens of thousands of induced loops, i. e. 100 million degrees of freedom in the simulation. The code is based on Numodis code developed at CEA Saclay and the ScalFMM library developed in H/14iePACS project. The code is written in C++ language and using the last features of C++11. One of the main aspects is the hybrid parallelism MPI/OpenMP that gives the software the ability to scale on large cluster while the computation load rises. In order to achieve that, we use different levels of parallelism. First of all, the simulation box is distributed over MPI processes, then we use a thinner level for threads, dividing the domain by an Octree representation. All theses parts are controlled by the ScalFMM library. On the last level, our data are stored in an adaptive structure that absorbs the dynamics of this type of simulation and manages the parallelism of tasks..