245 research outputs found
Large-scale grid-enabled lattice-Boltzmann simulations of complex fluid flow in porous media and under shear
Well designed lattice-Boltzmann codes exploit the essentially embarrassingly
parallel features of the algorithm and so can be run with considerable
efficiency on modern supercomputers. Such scalable codes permit us to simulate
the behaviour of increasingly large quantities of complex condensed matter
systems. In the present paper, we present some preliminary results on the large
scale three-dimensional lattice-Boltzmann simulation of binary immiscible fluid
flows through a porous medium derived from digitised x-ray microtomographic
data of Bentheimer sandstone, and from the study of the same fluids under
shear. Simulations on such scales can benefit considerably from the use of
computational steering and we describe our implementation of steering within
the lattice-Boltzmann code, called LB3D, making use of the RealityGrid steering
library. Our large scale simulations benefit from the new concept of capability
computing, designed to prioritise the execution of big jobs on major
supercomputing resources. The advent of persistent computational grids promises
to provide an optimal environment in which to deploy these mesoscale simulation
methods, which can exploit the distributed nature of compute, visualisation and
storage resources to reach scientific results rapidly; we discuss our work on
the grid-enablement of lattice-Boltzmann methods in this context.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in
Phil.Trans.R.Soc.Lond.
Large-Eddy Simulations of Flow and Heat Transfer in Complex Three-Dimensional Multilouvered Fins
The paper describes the computational procedure and
results from large-eddy simulations in a complex three-dimensional
louver geometry. The three-dimensionality in the
louver geometry occurs along the height of the fin, where the
angled louver transitions to the flat landing and joins with the
tube surface. The transition region is characterized by a swept
leading edge and decreasing flow area between louvers.
Preliminary results show a high energy compact vortex jet
forming in this region. The jet forms in the vicinity of the louver
junction with the flat landing and is drawn under the louver in
the transition region. Its interaction with the surface of the
louver produces vorticity of the opposite sign, which aids in
augmenting heat transfer on the louver surface. The top surface
of the louver in the transition region experiences large velocities
in the vicinity of the surface and exhibits higher heat transfer
coefficients than the bottom surface.Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Project 9
Accelerating the Rate of Astronomical Discovery with GPU-Powered Clusters
In recent years, the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) has emerged as a low-cost
alternative for high performance computing, enabling impressive speed-ups for a
range of scientific computing applications. Early adopters in astronomy are
already benefiting in adapting their codes to take advantage of the GPU's
massively parallel processing paradigm. I give an introduction to, and overview
of, the use of GPUs in astronomy to date, highlighting the adoption and
application trends from the first ~100 GPU-related publications in astronomy. I
discuss the opportunities and challenges of utilising GPU computing clusters,
such as the new Australian GPU supercomputer, gSTAR, for accelerating the rate
of astronomical discovery.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of ADASS XXI, ed. P.Ballester and
D.Egret, ASP Conf. Se
HARDWARE DESIGN OF MESSAGE PASSING ARCHITECTURE ON HETEROGENEOUS SYSTEM
Heterogeneous multi/many-core chips are commonly used in today’s top tier supercomputers. Similar heterogeneous processing elements — or, computation ac- celerators — are commonly found in FPGA systems. Within both multi/many-core chips and FPGA systems, the on-chip network plays a critical role by connecting these processing elements together. However, The common use of the on-chip network is for point-to-point communication between on-chip components and the memory in- terface. As the system scales up with more nodes, traditional programming methods, such as MPI, cannot effectively use the on-chip network and the off-chip network, therefore could make communication the performance bottleneck.
This research proposes a MPI-like Message Passing Engine (MPE) as part of the on-chip network, providing point-to-point and collective communication primitives in hardware. On one hand, the MPE improves the communication performance by offloading the communication workload from the general processing elements. On the other hand, the MPE provides direct interface to the heterogeneous processing ele- ments which can eliminate the data path going around the OS and libraries. Detailed experimental results have shown that the MPE can significantly reduce the com- munication time and improve the overall performance, especially for heterogeneous computing systems because of the tight coupling with the network. Additionally, a hybrid “MPI+X” computing system is tested and it shows MPE can effectively of- fload the communications and let the processing elements play their strengths on the computation
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