Scalability of the CTH Shock Physics Code on the Cray XT

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 high-velocity 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 message-passing code was found to scale linearly on the two computer systems evaluated across the range of cases considered.