Scalability of the CTH Shock Physics Code on the Cray XT

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of an explicit message-passing paradigm for an Eulerian finite volume method for modeling solid dynamics problems involving shock wave propagation, multiple materials, and large deformations. Three-dimensional simulations of highvelocity impact were conducted on two scalable high performance computing systems to evaluate the performance of the message-passing code. Simulations were performed using greater than three billion computational cells running on more than 8,000 processor cores. The performance of the messagepassing code was found to scale linearly on the two computer systems evaluated across the range of cases considered.