Monte Carlo Particle Simulation of Low-Density Fluid Flow on MIMD Supercomputers

S. J. Plimpton and T. J. Bartel, in Proc of Scalable High Performance Computing Conference, Williamsburg, VA, April 1992, p 212.

Direct Simulation Monte Carlo is a well-established technique for modeling low density fluid flows. The parallel implementation of a general simulation which allows for body-fitted grids, particle weighting, and a variety of surface and flow chemistry models is described. We compare its performance on a 1024-node nCUBE 2 to a serial version for the CRAY-YMP. Experiences with load-balancing the computation via graph-based heuristics (Kernighan and Lin) and the newer spectral techniques (Pothen, Simon, and Liou) are also discussed. This is a critical issue since density fluctuations can create orders-of-magnitude differences in computational loads as the simulation progresses.

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