A Scalable Multiphysics Algorithm for Massively Parallel Direct Numerical Simulations of Electrophoresis

TL;DR

This paper presents a highly scalable multiphysics algorithm for simulating electrophoresis in microfluidic flows, combining Eulerian and Lagrangian methods with lattice Boltzmann techniques for complex geometries.

Contribution

It introduces a novel massively parallel coupled algorithm that efficiently simulates electrophoresis with over 70,000 time steps and millions of particles on supercomputers.

Findings

Successful validation with extensive time steps

Excellent scalability on 65,536 cores

Simulation of over 4 million particles

Abstract

In this article we introduce a novel coupled algorithm for massively parallel direct numerical simulations of electrophoresis in microfluidic flows. This multiphysics algorithm employs an Eulerian description of fluid and ions, combined with a Lagrangian representation of moving charged particles. The fixed grid facilitates efficient solvers and the employed lattice Boltzmann method can efficiently handle complex geometries. Validation experiments with more than $70\,000$ time steps are presented, together with scaling experiments with over ${4\cdot10^{6}}$ particles and ${1.96\cdot10^{11}}$ grid cells for both hydrodynamics and electric potential. We achieve excellent performance and scaling on up to $65\,536$ cores of a current supercomputer.