Micromagnetic modelling of naturally occurring magnetic mineral systems: II
This was the second HECToR Distributed Computational Science and Engineering (dCSE) project to port and parallelise a code (microMag) which models the magnetic properties of mineral systems on to HECToR. This code represents the magnetisation within a structure using vectors located at the vertices of a finite element mesh in order to generate a high-fidelity 3D micro-magnetic model.
The key aims of this project were:
- to complete the parallelisation of the code started in the original project, with particular focus on the generation of the stiffness matrices
- and to incorporate a mesh repartitioning algorithm into the code in order to enhance performance.
The scientific goal of this project was to enable the investigation of large-scale simulations with increased system-size and precision which were previously not possible. These simulations will be of benefit to research into mineral- and palaeo-magnetism.
The achievements of the project are summarised below:
- A working parallel version of microMag has been developed, allowing larger simulations to be modelled than previous possible
- The mesh repartitioning has been enabled within the code
- The PETSc library has been used to provide almost all the required parallel and numerical functionality. The PETSc the adaptive timestep ordinary differential equation solver CVODE and the mesh partitioning library ParMETIS have been utilised. This should enhance the future portability of the code to machines other than HECToR
- A benchmark model containing more than 100,000 elements showed speedups of over four times faster on 16 cores.
Please see PDF or HTML for a report which summarises this work.
