Fracture in three-dimensional random fuse model: recent advances through high-performance computing

The paper presents the state-of-the-art algorithmic developments for simulating the fracture of disordered quasi-brittle materials using discrete lattice systems. Large scale simulations are often required to obtain accurate scaling laws; however, due to computational complexity, the simulations using the traditional algorithms were limited to small system sizes. In our earlier work, we have developed two algorithms: a multiple sparse Cholesky downdating scheme for simulating 2D random fuse model systems, and a block-circulant preconditioner for simulating 3D random fuse model systems. Using these algorithms, we were able to simulate fracture of largest ever lattice system sizes (L = 1024 in 2D, and L = 64 in 3D) with extensive statistical sampling. Our recent massively parallel simulations on 1024 processors of Cray-XT3 and IBM Blue-Gene/L have further enabled us to explore fracture of 3D lattice systems of size L = 128, which is a significant computational achievement. Based on these large-scale simulations, we analyze the scaling of crack surface roughness.