Numerical predictions of laminar and turbulent forced convection: Lattice Boltzmann simulations using parallel libraries

• Main Authors: Basha, M., Sidik, N. A. C.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd. 2018
• Subjects: T Technology (General)
• Online Access: http://eprints.utm.my/id/eprint/81879/1/NorAzwadiCheSidek2018_NumericalPredictionsofLaminarandTurbulentForced.pdf; http://eprints.utm.my/id/eprint/81879/; http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijheatmasstransfer.2017.09.072

This paper presents the performance comparison of various parallel lattice Boltzmann codes for simulation of incompressible laminar convection in 2D and 3D channels. Five different parallel libraries namely; matlabpool, pMatlab, GPU-Matlab, OpenMP and OpenMP+OpenMPI were used to parallelize the serial lattice Boltzmann method code. Domain decomposition method was adopted for parallelism for 2D and 3D uniform lattice grids. Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook approximation with lattice types D2Q9, D2Q19 and D2Q5, D2Q6 were considered to solve 2D and 3D fluid flow and heat transfer respectively. Parallel computations were conducted on a workstation and an IBM HPC cluster with 32 nodes. Laminar forced convection in a 2D and turbulent forced convection in a 3D channels was considered as a test case. The performance of parallel LBM codes was compared with serial LBM code. Results show that for a given problem, parallel simulations using matlabpool and pMatlab library perform almost equal. Parallel simulations using C language with OpenMP libraries were 10 times faster than simulations involving Matlab parallel libraries. Parallel simulations with OpenMP+OpenMPI were 0.35 times faster than the reported parallel lattice Boltzmann method code in the literature.