Communications of the ACM
Researchers Shoot For Success With Simulations of Laser Pulse-Material Interactions
A team from the University of Virginia-based team is using the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's Titan supercomputer to better understand material design at the nanoscale.
Credit: Leonid Zhigilei
Researchers at the University of Virginia have used the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's Titan supercomputer to model laser interactions with metallic surfaces, studying atomic-scale phase transformations.
The team notes by running long simulations comprised of millions of time steps, they may be able to observe all the phenomena occurring during a laser-metal interaction in a total time of several nanoseconds.
The researchers recently conducted a 2.8-billion-atom simulation of silver for 3.2 nanoseconds, comparing for the first time the frozen surface's morphology to experimental data.
Their ability to expand simulations stems from designing their code to use accelerators such as Titan's graphical-processing units.
The team subsequently realized a seven-fold acceleration over central-processing-unit-only methods, and this helped them run larger, more complex simulations and expand the study into the modeling of metal processing outside of a vacuum.
From Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility
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Abstracts Copyright © 2017 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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