Multilevel Parallel Programming for Three-Dimensional Voronoi Cell Finite Element Modeling of Heterogeneous Materials

In this paper we present work aimed at implementing an efficient parallel model for the three-dimensional Voronoi cell finite element model (VCFEM), which has been developed as an effective tool for modeling heterogeneous microstructures of composite, porous or polycrystalline materials, on SMP cluster systems. In these systems, multiprocessor nodes offer shared memory on the node and distributed memory between the nodes. The approach uses multiple parallel models to efficiently decompose the problem based on computational requirements. The Message Passing Interface (MPI) library is used for distributed memory decomposition between nodes, and multithreading using the OpenMP (OMP) library is used for shared memory decomposition on each node. The results presented show the improvement in performance using just OpenMP programming for a problem with a single element in the simulation, and using the multilevel programming approach for a simulation using multiple elements in the VCFEM. The scalability of the multilevel parallel programming method is also discussed.