Large Scale Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Femtosecond Laser Ablation of Silicon Using Sensing-VISICOM

Abstract

Silicon is widely used as substrate material for the fabrication of micro-electro and micromechanical components. Since silicon is very brittle, how to cut it into complex shapes remains a hot topic. Thanks to the small spot diameter, laser cutting is a promising alternative. However, during laser cutting, different kinds of defects can be generated depending on the beam-material interaction phenomena (ablation, melting, etc). Molecular Dynamics simulation is an effective way to study the beam-material interaction phenomena. Lots of work has been done to develop MD models of laser ablation of silicon. However, due to lack of support from high performance parallel simulation platform, the scale of the molecular systems is limited. This paper presents a component-based parallel simulation platform Sensing-VISICOM, for large scale molecular dynamics simulation. To test its runtime performance, a molecular system of femtosecond laser ablation of silicon is designed and implemented under Sensing-VISICOM. The results of the simulation show the platform can scales well to millions of atoms.