Asynchronous Parallelization of a CFD Solver

Abstract

A Navier-Stokes equations solver is parallelized to run on a cluster of computers using the domain decomposition method. Two approaches of communication and computation are investigated, namely, synchronous and asynchronous methods. Asynchronous communication between subdomains is not commonly used in CFD codes; however, it has a potential to alleviate scaling bottlenecks incurred due to processors having to wait for each other at designated synchronization points. A common way to avoid this idle time is to overlap asynchronous communication with computation. For this to work, however, there must be something useful and independent a processor can do while waiting for messages to arrive. We investigate an alternative approach of computation, namely, conducting asynchronous iterations to improve local subdomain solution while communication is in progress. An in-house CFD code is parallelized using message passing interface (MPI), and scalability tests are conducted that suggest asynchronous iterations are a viable way of parallelizing CFD code.