Acceleration of phase-field lattice Boltzmann simulation of dendrite growth with thermosolutal convection by the multi-GPUs parallel computation with multiple mesh and time step method

Thermosolutal convection inevitably occurs during the solidification of alloys owing to the nonuniform distribution of temperature and/or solute concentration, and this can drastically alter the resulting solidification microstructures. In this study, we present a large-scale simulation scheme for the phase-field lattice Boltzmann model, which can express dendrite growth upon considering the solute, heat transport, and liquid flow. A multiple mesh and time step method was employed to reduce computational costs, where different mesh sizes and time steps are used to solve the phase-field equation, the advection–diffusion equations of heat and solute, and the lattice Boltzmann equations for fluid flow. Furthermore, we implemented parallel computations using multiple graphics processing units (GPUs) to accelerate the large-scale simulation. Through the application of the multiple mesh and time step method, the computation was accelerated by approximately one hundred times compared to the case using a constant mesh and time step for all equations. Moreover, we confirmed that the developed parallel-GPU computation combined with the multiple mesh and time step method could achieve good acceleration and scaling through increasing the number of GPUs. We also confirmed that the developed method could simulate multiple dendrite growth with thermosolutal convection. (paper)