Two Parallel Algorithms for a Mass Transfer Simulation of Magnetic Nanoparticles

Abstract

We present a comparative study on the performance of two parallel algorithms for simulating mass transfer of weakly magnetic nanoparticles during the process of High Gradient Magnetic Separation (HGMS). The dynamics of mass transfer is investigated statistically in term of particle volume concentration and is described by the continuity equation which is solved numerically using the finite-difference. For parallelization, the concentration data are divided into equal parts that are distributed to a group of parallel processes. Parallel computations are performed by using two communication schemes of MPI, the pair-wise blocking and non-blocking operations. We compare the performance of both schemes interms of parallel speedup, efficiency, and communication overhead. The results show that parallel simulation using the non-blocking communication has better performance than the blocking communication and also shows the better scalability with increasing number of processes.