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

Abstract

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.