PC to parallel

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PC to parallel.

The phrase "PC to Parallel" has a double significance. First, it is a reminder that PHOENICS has for many years operated with full functionality on the whole range of hardware platforms, from personal computers (first DOS, now Windows) to super-computers.

An across-the-board parallelization of PHOENICS was effected during the 1990's. The adoption of the domain-decomposition technique enabled a single version to be employed for all the commonly-employed parallel-computer configurations.

These may be of shared-memory or distributed-memory configuration.

Recently, the second significance of the phrase has been realised: parallel PHOENICS now operates successfully, and with high efficiency, on clusters of personal computers linked by fast Ethernet, under the LINUX operating system.

The Benefits of Parallel CFD

Accuracy:For CFD predictions to be realistic, the use of fine grids is essential requiring powerful computers with large memory resources.
Speed: For CFD techniques to be used routinely in design and production cycles, fast computers are required to achieve reasonable iterative times.
Scalability: As computng demands increase one can upgrade the parallel system by adding more processors, thereby enhancing rather than repeating on the initial investment.
Economy: Parallel computers give better price/performance ratios than vector supercomputers.

The performance for the simulation of the flow of water around a ship's hull for different platforms is shown below; figure 1 shows the reduction of elapsed time brought about by increasing the number of processors, and figure 2 shows the speed increase versus number of processors.

The speed increase is seen to be almost linear with the number of processors.

Figure 1 Elapsed time versus number of processors

Figure 2 Speed increase versus number of processors.

Platforms

PHOENICS has now been ported and benchmarked on a wide range of parallel machines, indeed all MPP and SMP computers that support message passing (MPI or PVM) can now run parallel PHOENICS.

Systems Benchmarked:

CRAY J90 Intel Paragon

Digital AlphaServers Parsytec

IBM RS6000/SP, SiGr Power Challenge, Origin, Octane

Hewlett Packard HP-K240 , PC-Clusters (Intel Pentium 200 PCs)

Parallel PHOENICS is also available on the following systems:

Convex SPP1200, Hitachi SR2001

CRAY T3Em T3D and T90 NEC S-4

Fujitsu V-4, VPP500, VPP700Sun Servers