Scalability analysis of the phase field fracture finite element program

Abstract

In this work, the parallel scalability of the finite element program for the simulation of fracture in elastic-plastic solids is analyzed. The in-house finite element program, from here on referred to as PLEANv1.0, is written as a user element and a user material model for the research code Finite Element Analysis Program (FEAP) developed by Prof. R. L. Taylor from the University of California Berkeley. After introducing the fundamentals of the background theory of the finite element method, the phase field method of fracture and the underlying constitutive relations of elastic-plastic solids, the scalability analysis is performed by solving a mechanical problem with 3D unit cube geometry and uniaxial tensile load. The scalability and performance of the PLEANv1.0 is obtained for computations performed over a high performance computing (HPC) cluster using 576 CPUs. A comparison of the scalability and performance of PLEANv1.0 with the research code FEAP for different solution options is also discussed. The promising scalability of PLEANv1.0 allows solution of very large problems in a computationally efficient manner by using the HPC cluster.