Spatiotemporal parallelization of an analytical heat conduction model for additive manufacturing via a hybrid OpenMP + MPI approach

Abstract The ability to do thermal simulations for entire additive manufacturing builds is a key computational problem facing the additive manufacturing community; however, complex numerical models considering multiple physical phenomena currently do not have the capacity for simulations at this scale. To this end, conduction only analytic models offer a viable approach due to the massive drop in computational expense. Here, we extend an existing implementation which uses a governing equation which can be evaluated at any point in space and time. This implementation already utilizes OpenMP with a spatial decompositions scheme stemming from a melt pool tracking algorithm. We then combine this with a parallel in time (PinT) approach to make the problem highly parallelizable. The new scheme, which uses MPI for internode communication and OpenMP for intranode communication, is shown to scale very well across multiple computational nodes. This approach results in the ability to simulate the 3D solidification conditions for entire layers of additively manufactured parts in minutes making part scale thermal simulations more practical.