MPI-Parallelization of a Structured Grid CFD Solver including an Integrated Octree Grid Generator

Report, 2013

An existing Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) solver is parallelized by means of MPI. The solver includes a dynamic and adaptive grid generator for Cartesian Quadtree and Octree grids, which therefore also have to be parallelized. The grid generator generates grids fulfilling a specific set of rules, that have to be enforced also in parallel. The assembly of the large sparse matrices resulting from the implicit discretization of Navier-Stokes equations is done in parallel, as is the solving process. The parallel performance of both of these processes depends heavily on a good load balancing in order to reach satisfactory speedup. Two versions of load balancing are demonstrated, one based on block swapping, and the other by utilizing the Metis or Parmetis software packages for load balancing of graphs. Results are presented for load balancing and for the parallel speedup of solving the linear algebra system of equations.