Coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical modelling: A new parallel approach

Author

Vardon, P.J. ; Banicescu, I. ; Cleall, P.J. ; Thomas, H.R. ; Philp, R.N.

Author_Institution

Geoenvironmental Res. Centre, Cardiff Univ., Cardiff, UK

fYear

2009

fDate

23-29 May 2009

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

9

Abstract

A hybrid MPI/OpenMP method of parallelising a bi-conjugate gradient iterative solver for coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical finite-element simulations in unsaturated soil is implemented and found to be efficient on modern parallel computers. In particular, a new method of parallelisation using a hybrid multi-threaded and message-passing approach depending on calculation size was implemented yielding better performance over more processing units. This was tested on both an Opteron 2218 2.6 GHz Dual-Core processor based system with a Gigabit Ethernet interconnect and an Intel Xeon (Harpertown/Seaburg) 3.0 GHz Quad-Core processor based system with an InfiniBand Connect-X interconnect. The impact of the experimental results reflect on the scalability of field-scale simulations with a higher resolution both spatially and temporally.

Keywords

application program interfaces; finite element analysis; geophysics computing; gradient methods; local area networks; message passing; microprocessor chips; multi-threading; 3.0 GHz Quad-Core processor; InfiniBand Connect-X interconnect; MPI method; OpenMP method; Opteron 2218 2.6 GHz Dual-Core processor; bi-conjugate gradient iterative solver; coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical finite-element simulations; coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical modelling; gigabit Ethernet interconnect; hybrid multithreaded approach; message-passing approach; unsaturated soil; Computational modeling; Computer simulation; Concurrent computing; Ethernet networks; Finite element methods; Iterative methods; Scalability; Soil; Spatial resolution; System testing;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Parallel & Distributed Processing, 2009. IPDPS 2009. IEEE International Symposium on

Conference_Location

Rome

ISSN

1530-2075

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-3751-1

Electronic_ISBN

1530-2075

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IPDPS.2009.5161160

Filename

5161160