Implementação de um algoritmo de mecânica dos fluidos computacional projetado para plataformas de processamento paralelo com memória distribuída

摘要

This work discusses the implementation of a numerical algorithm for simulating incompressible fluid flows, based on the finite difference method, and designed for parallel computing platforms with distributed-memory, particularly for clusters of workstations. The solution algorithm for the Navier-Stokes equations utilizes an explicit scheme for pressure and an implicit scheme for velocities. The parallel implementation is based on domain decomposition, where the original calculation domain is decomposed into several blocks, each of which given to a separate processing node. All nodes then execute computations in parallel, each node on its associated sub-domain. The parallel computations include initialization, coefficient generation, linear solution on the sub-domain, and inter-node communication. The exchange of information across the sub-domains, or processors, is achieved using the message passing interface standard, MPI. The use of MPI ensures portability across different computing platforms ranging from massively parallel machines to clusters of workstations. Three different optimization strategies were evaluated in order to improve the computational performance of the algorithm, which include techniques exploring a reduction in the communication volume between processors and a more efficient utilization of the microprocessor s cache memory. In order to evaluate the performance levels obtained, and to analyze the effectiveness of the optimization strategies adopted, simulations using a 64 nodes cluster were executed. The simulations were performed using 2 to 56 processors, where execution time and speed-up were measured. The results indicate that the optimizations related to communication factors can improve the speed-up obtained up to 165%, while the cache memory optimization technique used can improve the speed-up obtained in further 40%.