Heterogeneous CPU+GPU approaches for mesh refinement over Lattice-Boltzmann simulations

Pedro Valero-Lara, Johan Jansson

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

30 Scopus citations

Abstract

The use of mesh refinement in CFD is an efficient and widely used methodology to minimize the computational cost by solving those regions of high geometrical complexity with a finer grid. In this work, the author focuses on studying two methods, one based on Multi-Domain and one based on Irregular meshing, to deal with mesh refinement over LBM simulations. The numerical formulation is presented in detail. It is proposed two approaches, homogeneous GPU and heterogeneous CPU+GPU, on each of the refinement methods. Obviously, the use of the two architectures, CPU and GPU, to compute the same problem involves more important challenges with respect to the homogeneous counterpart. These challenges and the strategies to deal with them are described in detail into the present work. We pay a particular attention to the differences among both methodologies/implementations in terms of programmability, memory management, and performance. The size of the refined sub-domain has important consequences over both methodologies; however, the influence on Multi-Domain approach is much higher. For instance, when dealing with a big refined sub-domain, the Multi-Domain approach achieves an important fall in performance with respect to other cases, where the size of the refined sub-domain is smaller. Otherwise, using the Irregular approach, there is no such a dramatic fall in performance when increasing the size of the refined sub-domain.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere3919
JournalConcurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience
Volume29
Issue number7
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 10 2017
Externally publishedYes

Funding

This research has been supported by EU-FET grant EUNISON308874, the Basque Excellence Research Center (BERC 2014-2017) program by the Basque Government, the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness MINECO: BCAM Severo Ochoa accreditation SEV-2013-0323 and the Project of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness with reference MTM2013-40824. We also thank the support of the computing facilities of Extremadura Research Centre for Advanced Technologies (CETA-CIEMAT) and NVIDIA GPU Research Center program for the provided resources.

Keywords

  • Lattice-Boltzmann method
  • computational fluid dynamics
  • heterogeneous CPU+GPU platforms
  • mesh refinement

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