Communication Optimization for Multiphase Flow Solver in the Library of OpenFOAM

• Main Authors: Zhipeng Lin, Wenjing Yang, Houcun Zhou, Xinhai Xu, Liaoyuan Sun, Yongjun Zhang, Yuhua Tang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2018-10-01
• Series: Water
• Subjects: communication optimization; CFD; PCG; MULES
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/10/10/1461

Multiphase flow solvers are widely-used applications in OpenFOAM, whose scalability suffers from the costly communication overhead. Therefore, we establish communication-optimized multiphase flow solvers in OpenFOAM. In this paper, we first deliver a scalability bottleneck test on the typical multiphase flow case damBreak and reveal that the Message Passing Interface (MPI) communication in a Multidimensional Universal Limiter for Explicit Solution (MULES) and a Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (PCG) algorithm is the short slab of multiphase flow solvers. Furthermore, an analysis of the communication behavior is carried out. We find that the redundant communication in MULES and the global synchronization in PCG are the performance limiting factors. Based on the analysis, we propose our communication optimization algorithm. For MULES, we remove the redundant communication and obtain optMULES. For PCG, we import several intermediate variables and rearrange PCG to reduce the global communication. We also overlap the computation of matrix-vector multiply and vector update with the non-blocking computation. The resulting algorithms are respectively referred to as OFPiPePCG and OFRePiPePCG. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method could dramatically increase the parallel scalability and solving speed of multiphase flow solvers in OpenFOAM approximately without the loss of accuracy.