Design and implementation of "many parallel task" hybrid subsurface model

• Authors: Khushbu Agarwal;Jared M. Chase;Karen L. Schuchardt;Timothy D. Schiebe;Bruce J. Palmer;Todd O. Elsethagen
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2011 ACM international workshop on Many task computing on grids and supercomputers
• Year: 2011

Continuum scale models have been used to study subsurface flow, transport, and reactions for many years. Recently, pore scale models, which operate at scales of individual soil grains, have been developed to more accurately model pore scale phenomena, such as precipitation, that may not be well represented at the continuum scale. However, particle-based models become prohibitively expensive for modeling realistic domains. Instead, we are developing a hybrid model that simulates the full domain at continuum scale and applies the pore model only to areas of high reactivity. The hybrid model uses a dimension reduction approach to formulate the mathematical exchange of information across scales. Since the location, size, and number of pore regions in the model varies, an adaptive Pore Generator is being implemented to define pore regions at each iteration. A fourth code will provide data transformation from the pore scale back to the continuum scale. These components are coupled into a single hybrid model using the Swift workflow system. Our hybrid model workflow simulates a kinetic controlled mixing reaction in which multiple pore-scale simulations occur for every continuum scale time step. Each pore-scale simulation is itself parallel, thus exhibiting multi-level parallelism. Our workflow manages these multiple parallel tasks simultaneously, with the number of tasks changing across iterations. It also supports dynamic allocation of job resources and visualization processing at each iteration. We discuss the design, implementation and challenges associated with building a scalable, Many Parallel Task, hybrid model to run efficiently on thousands to tens of thousands of processors.