EXASTEEL - Bridging Scales for Multiphase Steels
CDS members associated with the project: Prof. Dr. Axel Klawonn, Dr. Martin Lanser
EXASTEEL is a research project within the German exascale computing initiative of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) within the priority program SPP 1648 Software for Exascale Computing. The EXASTEEL team is a consortium of applied mathematicians, computer scientists, and material scientists from engineering. It consists of five national groups and one international group; see http://www.numerik.uni-koeln.de/14079.html for more details.
The computational simulation of advanced high strength steels, incorporating phase transformation phenomena at the microscale, on the future supercomputers developed for exascale computing is considered in this project. To accomplish this goal, new ultra-scalable, robust algorithms and solvers have to be developed and incorporated into a new application software for the simulation of this three dimensional multiscale material science problem. Such algorithms must specifically be designed to allow the efficient use of the hardware. Here, a direct multiscale approach (FE2) will be combined with new, highly efficient, parallel solver algorithms. For the latter algorithms, a hybrid algorithmic approach will be taken, combining nonoverlapping parallel domain decomposition (FETI) methods with efficient, parallel multigrid preconditioners. A comprehensive performance engineering approach will be implemented to ensure a systematic optimization and parallelization process across all software layers. The envisioned scale-bridging will still require a computational power which will only be obtainable when exascale computing becomes available. The FE2 methods has shown to be scalable on the complete JUQUEEN supercomputer at Forschungszentrum Jülich (BG/Q with 458 752 cores).