Performance evaluation of a parallel sparse lattice Boltzmann solver

We develop a performance prediction model for a parallelized sparse lattice Boltzmann solver and present performance results for simulations of flow in a variety of complex geometries. A special focus is on partitioning and memory/load balancing strategy for geometries with a high solid fraction and/or complex topology such as porous media, fissured rocks and geometries from medical applications. The topology of the lattice nodes representing the fluid fraction of the computational domain is mapped on a graph. Graph decomposition is performed with both multilevel recursive-bisection and multilevel k-way schemes based on modified Kernighan-Lin and Fiduccia-Mattheyses partitioning algorithms. Performance results and optimization strategies are presented for a variety of platforms, showing a parallel efficiency of almost 80% for the largest problem size. A good agreement between the performance model and experimental results is demonstrated. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.