Publications Details

A comparison of parallelization strategies for the Material Point Method

Ruggirello, Kevin P.; Schumacher, Shane C.

Recently the Lagrangian Material Point Method (MPM) [1] has been integrated into the Eulerian finite volume shock physics code CTH [2] at Sandia National Laboratories. CTH has the capabilities of adaptive mesh refinement (AMR), multiple materials and numerous material models for equation of state, strength, and failure. In order to parallelize the MPM in CTH two different approaches were tested. The first was a ghost particle concept, where the MPM particles are mirrored onto neighboring processors in order to correctly assemble the mesh boundary values on the grid. The second approach exchanges the summed mesh values at processor boundaries without the use of ghost particles. Both methods have distinct advantages for parallelization. These parallelization approaches were tested for both strong and weak scaling. This paper will compare the parallel scaling efficiency, and memory requirements of both approaches for parallelizing the MPM.