Cameron Druyor
Advances in Parallel Overset Domain Assembly
A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy in Computational Engineering, The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Cameron T. Druyor, Jr. , August 2016
Abstract:
The CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) community has long used the Overset Grid method to enable dynamic simulations with bodies in relative motion. In Overset simulations, information is transferred between overlapping grids via interpolation. Domain Assembly is the process that governs the location of intergrid boundaries and how the solution is interpolated across grids at those boundaries. Performing Domain Assembly in a distributed environment is computationally expensive and inherently poorly load balanced due to the solver partitioning. Dynamic load balancing is therefore required to alleviate the imbalance and make very large Overset problems feasible. In this work, a radically different parallel domain assembly method is introduced. The new method takes a fundamentally different approach to load balancing, concurrency, and communication patterns. A detailed discussion is provided that describes the method's implementation in YOGA (Yoga is an Overset Grid Assembler). Finally, several case studies are analyzed and preliminary performance and scaling results are provided.
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