OpenPFC: An open-source framework for high performance 3D phase field crystal simulations

We present OpenPFC (https://github.com/VTT-ProperTune/OpenPFC), a state-of-the-art phase field crystal (PFC) simulation platform designed to be scalable for massive high-performance computation environments. OpenPFC can efficiently handle large-scale simulations, as demonstrated by our strong and weak scaling analyses up to an 8192³ grid on 65 536 cores. Our results indicate that meaningful PFC simulations can be conducted on grids of size 2048³ or even 4096³, provided there is a sufficient number of cores and ample disk storage available. In addition, we introduce an efficient implementation of moving boundary conditions that eliminates the need for copying field values between MPI processes or adding an advection term to the evolution equations. This scheme enhances the computational efficiency in simulating large scale processes such as long directional solidification. To showcase the robustness of OpenPFC, we apply it to simulations of rapid solidification in the regime of metal additive manufacturing using a recently developed quantitative solid-liquid-vapor PFC model, parametrized for pure tungsten (body-centered cubic) and aluminum (face-centered cubic).