A co-located partitions strategy for parallel CFD-DEM couplings

TL;DR

This paper introduces a co-located partitioning strategy for parallel CFD-DEM simulations that significantly reduces communication overhead and memory usage, enhancing scalability for industrial applications.

Contribution

A novel co-located partitioning approach for CFD-DEM couplings that minimizes inter-process communication and memory consumption, improving parallel performance.

Findings

Inter-physics data exchange time is less than 0.1% of total runtime.

Strategy improves scalability and reduces communication bottlenecks.

Effective on a 280-core system with three benchmark tests.

Abstract

In this work, a new partition-collocation strategy for the parallel execution of CFD--DEM couplings is investigated. Having a good parallel performance is a key issue for an Eulerian-Lagrangian software that aims to be applied to solve industrially significant problems, as the computational cost of these couplings is one of their main drawback. The approach presented here consists in co-locating the overlapping parts of the simulation domain of each software on the same MPI process, in order to reduce the cost of the data exchanges. It is shown how this strategy allows reducing memory consumption and inter-process communication between CFD and DEM to a minimum and therefore to overcome an important parallelization bottleneck identified in the literature. Three benchmarks are proposed to assess the consistency and scalability of this approach. A coupled execution on 280 cores shows that less than 0.1% of the time is used to perform inter-physics data exchange.