LBM-IB: A Parallel Library to Solve 3D Fluid-Structure Interaction Problems on Manycore Systems

Abstract

Deformable structures are abundant in various domains such as biology, medicine, life sciences, and ocean engineering. Our previous work created a numerical method, named LBM-IB method [1], to solve the fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems. Our LBM-IB method is particularly suitable for simulating flexible (or elastic) structures immersed in a moving viscous fluid. Fluid-structure interaction problems are well known for their heavy demands on computing resources. Today, it is still challenging to resolve many real-world FSI problems. In order to solve large-scale fluid-structure interactions more efficiently, in this paper, we design a parallel LBM-IB library on shared memory many core architectures. We start from a sequential version, which is extended to two different parallel versions. The paper first introduces the mathematical background of the LBM-IB method, then uses the sequential version as a ground to present our implemented computational kernels and the algorithm. Next, it describes the two parallel programs: an Open MP implementation and a cube-based parallel implementation using Pthreads. The cube-based implementation builds upon our new cube-centric algorithm where all the data are stored in cubes and computations are performed on individual cubes in a data-centric manner. By exploiting better data locality and fine-grain block parallelism, the cube-based parallel implementation is able to outperform the Open MP implementation by up to 53% on 64-core computer systems.