It was recalled that dislocation dynamics, a discrete dynamic simulation method in which the dislocations were fundamental entities, was a powerful tool for investigating plasticity, deformation and fracture at the μm length-scale. Computational difficulties, arising from complex long-range interactions between the curvilinear line defects, limited the application of dislocation dynamics to the study of large-scale plastic deformation. The development of a parallel algorithm for the accelerated computer simulation of dislocation dynamics was presented here. By representing the dislocations as a 3-dimensional set of dislocation particles, it was shown here that the problem of an interacting ensemble of dislocations could be converted into a problem involving a particle-ensemble interacting with a long-range force field. A grid, using binary space partitioning, was constructed so as to keep track of the node connectivity across domains. The computational efficiency of the parallel micro-plasticity code was demonstrated, and it was shown how O(N) methods mapped naturally onto the parallel data structure.

A Parallel Algorithm for 3D Dislocation Dynamics. Z.Wang, N.Ghoniem, S.Swaminarayan, R.LeSar: Journal of Computational Physics, 2006, 219[2], 608-21