Computation of fluid flow with a parallel multigrid solver

A finite volume numerical method for the prediction of fluid flow and heat transfer in simple geometries was parallelized using a domain decomposition approach. The method is implicit, uses a colocated arrangement of variables and is based on the SIMPLE algorithm for pressure-velocity coupling. Discretization is based on second-order central difference approximations. The algebraic equation systems are solved by the ILU method of Stone.¹ To accelerate the convergence, a multigrid technique was used. The efficiency was examined on three different parallel computers for laminar flow in a pipe with an orifice and natural convection in a closed cavity. It is shown that the total efficiency is made up of three major factors: numerical efficiency, parallel efficiency and load-balancing efficiency. The first two factors were thoroughly investigated, and a model for predicting the parallel efficiency on various computers is presented. Test calculations indicate reasonable total efficiency and favourable dependence on grid size and the number of processors.