The phase-field method is gradually exploiting new research areas, and the demand for the ability to simulate larger domains is increasing continuously with the move towards massive parallel computation. We emphasize the efficient usage of high-performance computing resources by investigating the scaling behavior of 1D domain decomposition, 3D domain decomposition and the runtime behavior of the commonly used moving simulation domain as well as 1D load balancing for a finite difference phase-field implementation. A simple performance model for blocking communication and measurements shows that it is necessary to apply 3D domain decomposition for a 3D domain to scale on high-performance clusters.
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