Distributed and shared memory parallelism with a smoothed particle hydrodynamics code

Abstract

The Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (?) method, being Lagrangian in nature, provides advantages in modelling flows containing interfaces. The ? method is completely mesh-free, modelling the fluid as a collection of N particles which move with the fluid velocity. The continuum fluid properties at a particular location are interpolated as weighted sums of the properties of surrounding particles in a process known as kernel interpolation. In its simplest form the ? method requires that every particle is used in the updating of every other particle. This leads to a solution time that is proportional to N 2 . Methods using only nearby particles reduce this requirement significantly; however, the ? method is still expensive and would benefit from being implemented on a parallel computer. An example ? code has been parallelised using ?, OpenMP and ?, and its performance has been measured on an ?, Origin 2000 and a Beowulf workstation cluster.