On the efficiency of simulation methods for the Boltzmann equation on parallel computers

Abstract

The paper presents a parallelization technique for the finite pointset method, a numerical method for rarefield gas flows. First we give a short introduction to the Boltzmann equation, which describes the behaviour of rarefied gas flows. The basic ideas of the finite pointset method are presented and a strategy to parallelize the algorithm will be explained. It is shown that a static processor partition leads to an insufficient load balance of the processors. Therefore an optimized parallelization technique based on an adaptive processor partition will be introduced, which improves the efficiency of the simulation code over the whole region of interesting flow situation. Finally we present a comparison of the CPU-times between a parallel computer and a vector computer.