Parallel simulation of particle suspensions with the lattice Boltzmann method

  • Authors:

  • Kevin Stratford;Ignacio Pagonabarraga

  • Affiliations:

  • Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, James Clark Maxwell Building, The University of Edinburgh, The King's Buildings, Edinburgh EH9 3JZ, Scotland, United Kingdom;Departament de Física Fonamental, Universitat de Barcelona, Carrer Martí i Franqués 1, 08028-Barcelona, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Computers & Mathematics with Applications
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

A description of the steps taken to produce a massively parallel code for particle suspension problems using the lattice Boltzmann method is presented. A number of benchmarks based on a binary fluid lattice Boltzmann model are used to assess the performance of the code in terms of the computational overhead required for the particle problem compared with the fluid-only problem, and for the scaling of the code to large processor numbers. On the Blue Gene/L architecture, the additional computational cost of particle suspensions of up to 40% solid volume fraction (here over a million particles) is negligible compared with the fluid-only code.