GPU-accelerated phase-field simulation of dendritic solidification in a binary alloy

The phase-field simulation for dendritic solidification of a binary alloy has been accelerated by using a graphic processing unit (CPU). To perform the phase-field simulation of the alloy solidification on GPU, a program code was developed with computer unified device architecture (CUDA). In this paper, the implementation technique of the phase-field model on CPU is presented. Also, we evaluated the acceleration performance of the three-dimensional solidification simulation by using a single NVIDIA TESLA C1060 CPU and the developed program code. The results showed that the CPU calculation for 5763 computational grids achieved the performance of 170 GFLOPS by utilizing the shared memory as a software-managed cache. Furthermore, it can be demonstrated that the computation with the CPU is 100 times faster than that with a single CPU core. From the obtained results, we confirmed the feasibility of realizing a real-time full three-dimensional phase-field simulation of microstructure evolution on a personal desktop computer. (c) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.