LBsoft: A parallel open-source software for simulation of colloidal systems

F Bonaccorso and A Montessori and A Tiribocchi and G Amati and M Bernaschi and M Lauricella and S Succi, COMPUTER PHYSICS COMMUNICATIONS, 256, 107455 (2020).

DOI: 10.1016/j.cpc.2020.107455

We present LBsoft, an open-source software developed mainly to simulate the hydro-dynamics of colloidal systems based on the concurrent coupling between lattice Boltzmann methods for the fluid and discrete particle dynamics for the colloids. Such coupling has been developed before, but, to the best of our knowledge, no detailed discussion of the programming issues to be faced in order to attain efficient implementation on parallel architectures, has ever been presented to date. In this paper, we describe in detail the underlying multi-scale models, their coupling procedure, along side with a description of the relevant input variables, to facilitate third-parties usage. The code is designed to exploit parallel computing platforms, taking advantage also of the recent AVX-512 instruction set. We focus on LBsoft structure, functionality, parallel implementation, performance and availability, so as to facilitate the access to this computational tool to the research community in the field. The capabilities of LBsoft are highlighted for a number of prototypical case studies, such as pickering emulsions, bicontinuous systems, as well as an original study of the coarsening process in confined bijels under shear. Program summary Program Title: LBsoft CPC Library link to program files: http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/dvpfx9p342.1 Licensing provisions: BSD 3-Clause License Programming language: Fortran 95 Nature of problem: Hydro-dynamics of the colloidal multi-component systems and Pickering emulsions. Solution method: Numerical solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations by Lattice-Boltzmann (lattice-Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook, LBGK) method 1 describing the fluid dynamics within an Eulerian description. Numerical solutions to the equations of motion describing a set of discrete colloidal particles within a Lagrangian representation coupled to the LBGK solver 2. The numerical solution of the coupling algorithm includes the back reaction effects for each force term following a multi-scale paradigm. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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