Dynamic Load Balancing for the Parallel Simulation of Cavitating Flows

Abstract

This paper deals with the parallel numerical simulation of cavitating flows. The governing equations are the compressible, time dependent Euler equations for a homogeneous two-phase mixture. These equations are solved by an explicit finite volume approach. In opposite to the ideal gas, after each time step fluid properties, namely pressure and temperature, must be obtained iteratively for each cell. This is the most time consuming part, particularly if cavitation occurs. For this reason the algorithms has been parallelized by domain decomposition. In case where different sizes of cavitated regions occur on the different processes a huge load imbalance problem arises. In this paper a new dynamic load balancing algorithm is presented, which solves this problem efficiently.