The Kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) is one of the commonly used methods for simulating radiation damage of materials. Our team develops a parallel KMC software named Crystal-KMC, which supports the Embedded Atom Method (EAM) potential energy and utilizes the Message Passing Interface (MPI) technology to simulate the vacancy transition of the Copper (Cu) element under neutron radiation. To make better use of the computing power of modern supercomputers, we develop the parallel efficiency optimization model for the Crystal-KMC on Tianhe-2, to achieve a larger simulation of the damage process of materials under irradiation environment. Firstly, we analyze the performance bottleneck of the Crystal-KMC software and use the MIC offload statement to implement the operation of key modules of the software on the MIC coprocessor. We use OpenMP to develop parallel optimization for the Crystal-KMC, combined with existing MPI inter-process communication optimization, finally achieving hybrid parallel optimization. The experimental results show that in the single-node CPU and MIC collaborative parallel mode, the speedup of the calculation hotspot reaches 30.1, and the speedup of the overall software reaches 7.43.
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Kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) is a widely used method for studying the evolution of materials at themicrocosmic level. At present, while there are many simulation software programs based on this algorithm, most focus on the verification of a certain phenomenon and have no analog-scale requirement, so many are serial in nature. The dynamic Monte Carlo algorithm is implemented using a parallel framework called SPPARKS, but it does not support the Embedded Atom Method (EAM) potential, which is commonly used in the dynamic simulation of metal materials. Metal material — the preferred material for most containers and components — plays an important role in many fields, including construction engineering and transportation. In this paper, we propose and describe the development of a parallel software program called Crystal-KMC, which is specifically used to simulate the lattice dynamics of metallic materials. This software uses MPI to achieve a parallel multiprocessing mode, which avoid the limitations of serial software in the analog scale. Finally, we describe the use of the parallel-KMC simulation software Crystal-KMC in simulating the diffusion of vacancies in iron, and analyze the experimental results. In addition, we tested the performance of Crystal-KMC in “meta -Era” supercomputing clusters, and the results show the Crystal-KMC parallel software to have good parallel speedup and scalability.