Computation of Dendrites on Parallel Distributed Memory Architectures

. A code for simulating the solidication of a pure material from its undercooled melt based on a phase eld approach has been written for parallel distributed memory architectures using MPI. The numerical scheme is based on nite dierences and results in large sparse non-linear systems which are solved by a backtracking line search modication of Newton's method combined with GMRES. Experiments conducted on an IBM SP2 and networks of Sun Ultra 5 workstations show that the code scales well with the number of processors. 1 Introduction We are interested in accurately simulating the solidication of a pure material from its undercooled melt taking into account eects of surface tension and kinetic undercooling. This is perhaps the simplest physical process in which one can observe the growth of dendritic crystals, characterized by complicated tree-like patterns. Some properties of solids such as electric conductivity and mechanical strength are determined by the micro structures produ..