Tomorrow's micromagnetic simulations

Abstract

Micromagnetic simulations are a valuable tool to increase our understanding of nanomagnetic systems and to guide experiments through parameter spaces that would otherwise be difficult and expensive to navigate. To fulfill this task, simulations have always pushed the limits of what is possible in terms of software and hardware. In this perspective, we give an overview of the current state of the art in micromagnetic simulations of ferromagnetic materials followed by our opinion of what tomorrow's simulations will look like. Recently, the focus has shifted away from exclusively trying to achieve faster simulations, toward extending pure micromagnetic calculations to a multiphysics approach. We present an analysis of how the performance of the simulations is affected by the simulation details and hardware specifications (specific to the graphics processing unit-accelerated micromagnetic software package mumax 3), which sheds light on how micromagnetic simulations can maximally exploit the available computational power. Finally, we discuss how micromagnetic simulations can benefit from new hardware paradigms like graphics cards aimed at machine learning.