Non-linear phase field models are increasingly used for the simulation of fracture propagation problems. The numerical simulation of fracture networks of realistic size requires the efficient parallel solution of large coupled non-linear systems. Although in principle efficient iterative multi-level methods for these types of problems are available, they are not widely used in practice due to the complexity of their parallel implementation. Here, we present Utopia, which is an open-source C++ library for parallel non-linear multilevel solution strategies. Utopia provides the advantages of high-level programming interfaces while at the same time a framework to access low-level data-structures without breaking code encapsulation. Complex numerical procedures can be expressed with few lines of code, and evaluated by different implementations, libraries, or computing hardware. In this paper, we investigate the parallel performance of our implementation of the recursive multilevel trust-region (RMTR) method based on the Utopia library. RMTR is a globally convergent multilevel solution strategy designed to solve non-convex constrained minimization problems. In particular, we solve pressure-induced phase-field fracture propagation in large and complex fracture networks. Solving such problems is deemed challenging even for a few fractures, however, here we are considering networks of realistic size with up to 1000 fractures.

Geometry-related software is increasingly important in computational science and visual computing. Engineering such software is particularly challenging due to the size and complexity of the data it operates on. In this paper we present VESTIGE, a framework that employs visualization to address that challenge. VESTIGE targets four software engineering activities: (1) visualization-guided development, (2) monitoring and bug detection, (3) test oracle generation, and (4) debugging. We present five scenarios from our real-life experience as developers of geometry-related software that show how VESTIGE helps to improve the software development process. Integrating VESTIGE into the development workflow takes little effort and can have significant benefits.

We present a novel space-time parallel version of the Barnes-Hut tree code PEPC using PFASST, the Parallel Full Approximation Scheme in Space and Time. The naive use of increasingly more processors for a fixed-size N-body problem is prone to saturate as soon as the number of unknowns per core becomes too small. To overcome this intrinsic strong-scaling limit, we introduce temporal parallelism on top of PEPC's existing hybrid MPI/PThreads spatial decomposition. Here, we use PFASST which is based on a combination of the iterations of the parallel-in-time algorithm parareal with the sweeps of spectral deferred correction (SDC) schemes. By combining these sweeps with multiple space-time discretization levels, PFASST relaxes the theoretical bound on parallel efficiency in parareal. We present results from runs on up to 262,144 cores on the IBM Blue Gene/P installation JUGENE, demonstrating that the spacetime parallel code provides speedup beyond the saturation of the purely space-parallel approach.