A multi-GPU implementation of a full-field crystal plasticity solver for efficient modeling of high-resolution microstructures

Abstract

In a recent publication (Eghtesad et al., 2018), we have reported a message passing interface (MPI)-based domain decomposition parallel implementation of an elasto-viscoplastic fast Fourier transform-based (EVPFFT) micromechanical solver to facilitate computationally efficient crystal plasticity modeling of polycrystalline materials. In this paper, we present major extensions to the previously reported implementation to take advantage of graphics processing units (GPUs), which can perform floating point arithmetic operations much faster than traditional central processing units (CPUs). In particular, the applications are developed to utilize a single GPU and multiple GPUs from one computer as well as a large number of GPUs across nodes of a supercomputer. To this end, the implementation combines the OpenACC programming model for GPU acceleration with MPI for distributed computing. Moreover, the FFT calculations are performed using the efficient Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) FFT library, called CUFFT. Finally, to maintain performance portability, OpenACC-CUDA interoperability for data transfers between CPU and GPUs is used. The overall implementations are termed ACC-EVPCUFFT for single GPU and MPI-ACC-EVPCUFFT for multiple GPUs. To facilitate performance evaluation studies of the developed computational framework, deformation of a single phase copper is simulated, while to further demonstrate utility of the implementation for resolving fine microstructures, deformation of a dual-phase steel DP590 is simulated. The implementations and results are presented and discussed in this paper.