Large-scale simulation of high-intensity focused ultrasound with Sierra/SD

High-frequency simulations of acoustic wave propagation are known to be computationally challenging, and the difficulty is compounded for large domains. For problems like high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) with coupling between piezoelectric and acoustic media, both challenges are present. The larger domain sizes, higher-order elements, and greater levels of refinement necessary in such simulations result in millions of degrees of freedom, large system matrices, and substantial memory requirements, raising the need for parallel high-performance computing (HPC). Sierra/SD is a massively parallel HPC application developed for finite element method simulations in structural dynamics and acoustics. In this work, Sierra/SD is used to simulate an acoustic pulse from a piezoelectric transducer focused on an elastic scatterer in a fluid medium. Three-dimensional simulation results are presented for the acoustic field in the fluid and the stress field in the scatterer, and performance is compared between Sierra/SD and COMSOL Multiphysics for smaller geometries. Finally, to showcase the expanded analysis possibilities afforded by HPC for HIFU, an example is presented using a support vector machine to determine a decision boundary for maximum stress in the scatterer. [SNL is managed and operated by NTESS under DOE NNSA contract DE-NA0003525.]