Solving a Large-Scale Thermal Radiation Problem Using an Interoperable Executive Library Framework on Petascale Supercomputers

Abstract

We present a novel methodology to compute the transient thermal condition of a set of objects in an open space environment. The governing energy equation and the convective energy transfer are solved by the sparse iterative solvers. The average radiating energy on a set of surfaces is represented by a linear system of the radiosity equations, which is factorized by an out-of-core parallel Cholesky decomposition solver. The coupling and interplay of the direct radiosity solver using graphics processing units (GPUs) and the CPU-based sparse solver are handled by a light weight software integrator called Interoperable Executive Library (IEL). IEL manages the distribution of data and memory, coordinates communication among parallel processes, and also directs execution of the set of loosely coupled physics tasks as warranted by the thermal condition of the simulated object and its surrounding environment.