Design and Optimization of OpenFOAM-based CFD Applications for Modern Hybrid and Heterogeneous HPC Platforms

• Main Author: AlOnazi, Amani
• Other Authors: Keyes, David E.
• Language: en
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: hybrid multi GPU; Conjugate Gradient; Open FOAM; Multicore Solver
• Online Access: AlOnazi, A. (2014). Design and Optimization of OpenFOAM-based CFD Applications for Modern Hybrid and Heterogeneous HPC Platforms. KAUST Research Repository. https://doi.org/10.25781/KAUST-9M51I; http://hdl.handle.net/10754/316389

The progress of high performance computing platforms is dramatic, and most of the simulations carried out on these platforms result in improvements on one level, yet expose shortcomings of current CFD packages. Therefore, hardware-aware design and optimizations are crucial towards exploiting modern computing resources. This thesis proposes optimizations aimed at accelerating numerical simulations, which are illus- trated in OpenFOAM solvers. A hybrid MPI and GPGPU parallel conjugate gradient linear solver has been designed and implemented to solve the sparse linear algebraic kernel that derives from two CFD solver: icoFoam, which is an incompressible flow solver, and laplacianFoam, which solves the Poisson equation, for e.g., thermal dif- fusion. A load-balancing step is applied using heterogeneous decomposition, which decomposes the computations taking into account the performance of each comput- ing device and seeking to minimize communication. In addition, we implemented the recently developed pipeline conjugate gradient as an algorithmic improvement, and parallelized it using MPI, GPGPU, and a hybrid technique. While many questions of ultimately attainable per node performance and multi-node scaling remain, the ex- perimental results show that the hybrid implementation of both solvers significantly outperforms state-of-the-art implementations of a widely used open source package.