Development of Apple Workgroup Cluster and Parallel Computing for Phase Field Model of Magnetic Materials

Micromagnetic modeling numerically solves magnetization evolution equation to process magnetic domain analysis, which helps to understand the macroscopic magnetic properties of ferromagnets. To apply this method in simulation of magnetostrictive ferromagnets, there exist two main challenges: the complicated microelasticity due to the magnetostrictive strain, and very expensive computation mainly caused by the calculation of long-range magnetostatic and elastic interactions. A parallel computing for phase field model based on computer cluster is then developed as a promising tool for domain analysis in magnetostrictive ferromagnetic materials. We have successfully built an 8-node Apple workgroup cluster, deploying the hardware system and configuring the software environment, as a platform for parallel computation of phase field model of magnetic materials. Several testing programs have been implemented to evaluate the performance of the cluster system, especially for the application of parallel computation using MPI. The results show the cluster system can simultaneously support up to 32 processes for MPI program with high performance of interprocess communication. The parallel computations of phase field model of magnetic materials implemented by a MPI program have been performed on the developed cluster system. The simulated results of a single domain rotation in Terfenol-D crystals agree well with the theoretical prediction. A further simulation including magnetic and elastic interaction among multiple domains shows that we need take into account the interaction effects in order to accurately characterize the magnetization processes in Terfenol-D. These simulation examples suggest that the paralleling computation of the phase field model of magnetic materials based on a powerful cluster system is a promising technology that meets the need of domain analysis