Hybrid Parallel Computation of OpenFOAM Solver on Multi-Core Cluster Systems
Yuan Liu · KTH Publication Database DiVA (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) · 2011
OpenFOAM, an open source industrial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tool, which contains dozens of simulation application inside. A traditional approach to accelerate physical simulation process is to employ more powerful supercomputer. However, It is bound to expense large amount of hardware resources. In recent years, parallel and distributed computing is becoming an efficient way to solve such computational intensive application. This thesis pick up the most used compressible reacting solver named dieselFoam as the research target. Through the analysis of code structure in solver equation and native MPI implementation in OpenFOAM, deploy two level parallelism structure on SMP cluster, which use Message Passing Interface (MPI) between each SMP nodes and OpenMP directives inside SMP node. The key idea is making use of feature of threads parallelism, reduce unnecessary MPI communication overhead, thereby achieve performance improvement. The experiment results demonstrate application speedup by our solution, also in good agreement with the theoretical study. Based on the potential candidates analysis and performance results, we can conclude that the hybrid parallel model is proper for the acceleration of OpenFOAM solver application compare to the native MPI ways. Also through the discussion of the thesis, provides some suggestion about the future improvement area.