Parallel Simulation of Dendritic Growth on Unstructured Grids

In this paper we present our findings from parallelizing a material science application which simulates dendritic growth in molten metal alloys. The simulation itself is based on an iterative 2D meshfree model. The simulation cells are tightly coupled and depend on neighbors in a relatively large radius, so the code turned out to be communication bound. We present two different approaches for the parallelization: one specifically written for this application, and one which uses LibGeoDecomp, a stencil code library. Benchmarks show that the stencil code library performs much better than expected, despite not being designed for this use case.