Dynamic Load Balancing for Compressible Multiphase Turbulence

TL;DR

This paper introduces load balancing algorithms for high-fidelity simulations of particle-laden turbulent flows, significantly reducing computation time on large-scale exascale platforms by nearly tenfold.

Contribution

It presents novel load balancing algorithms tailored for CMT-nek, improving parallel efficiency and reducing simulation time in large-scale multiphase turbulence simulations.

Findings

Load balancing reduces simulation time by up to 9.97 times.

Different algorithms are compared in terms of performance and overhead.

Load balancing effectively mitigates processor load imbalance caused by moving particles.

Abstract

CMT-nek is a new scientific application for performing high fidelity predictive simulations of particle laden explosively dispersed turbulent flows. CMT-nek involves detailed simulations, is compute intensive and is targeted to be deployed on exascale platforms. The moving particles are the main source of load imbalance as the application is executed on parallel processors. In a demonstration problem, all the particles are initially in a closed container until a detonation occurs and the particles move apart. If all processors get an equal share of the fluid domain, then only some of the processors get sections of the domain that are initially laden with particles, leading to disparate load on the processors. In order to eliminate load imbalance in different processors and to speedup the makespan, we present different load balancing algorithms for CMT-nek on large scale multi-core platforms consisting of hundred of thousands of cores. The detailed process of the load balancing algorithms are presented. The performance of the different load balancing algorithms are compared and the associated overheads are analyzed. Evaluations on the application with and without load balancing are conducted and these show that with load balancing, simulation time becomes faster by a factor of up to $9.97$.