Accelerating phase-field simulations on exascale computing systems for faster-than-real-time precipitate aging predictions

Stephen DeWitt; David J. Gardner; Philip Fackler; Yonggil Song; Miroslav Stoyanov; Carol S. Woodward; Balasubramaniam Radhakrishnan

arXiv · 2609.36100

Accelerating phase-field simulations on exascale computing systems for faster-than-real-time precipitate aging predictions

Stephen DeWitt·David J. Gardner·Philip Fackler·Yonggil Song·Miroslav Stoyanov·Carol S. Woodward·Balasubramaniam Radhakrishnan

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Abstract

Three-dimensional phase-field simulations are a gold-standard for microstructure prediction for materials, but their computational cost often limits application-relevant calculations to modest domain sizes and timescales. Here, we present a holistic approach for accelerating Fourier pseudospectral phase-field simulations by combining performance-portable GPU computing, large-scale distributed-memory parallelism, and high-order implicit-explicit time integration within the MEUMAPPS C++ framework. We demonstrate this approach with a 1.5-billion-grid-point simulation of the growth and coarsening of 1,920 gamma'' precipitates in a Ni-Nb-Fe alloy. The simulated seven-hour heat treatment is completed in 5.5 hours, making the calculation faster than real time and an estimated 217-501x faster than a CPU-only, first-order baseline. This performance makes three-dimensional simulations of thousands of interacting precipitates tractable, enabling quantitative studies ocollective microstructural phenomena, large simulation ensembles, and real-time integration into controlling and interpreting experiments. Benchmarking shows single-node GPU speedups of up to 17.5x relative to comparable CPU resources, near-ideal strong scaling to 4096 GPUs for a 12-billion-grid-point problem, and a further 2.6-2.9x acceleration from fourth-order time integration at scientifically relevant error tolerances. These results establish a performance-portable strategy for exploiting leadership-scale GPU systems that is applicable to a broad class of Fourier pseudospectral simulations beyond phase-field models such as fluid dynamics and crystal plasticity simulations.

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Stephen DeWitt, David J. Gardner, Philip Fackler, Yonggil Song, Miroslav Stoyanov, Carol S. Woodward, Balasubramaniam Radhakrishnan. 2026-09-28. Accelerating phase-field simulations on exascale computing systems for faster-than-real-time precipitate aging predictions. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36100

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