A parallel solution scheme for multiphysics evolution problems using OpenPALM

Abstract

Multiphysics models seek to accurately represent complex phenomena by incorporating all relevant physical aspects. Therefore, multiphysics simulations often require the use of high performance computing resources. As an example application, we consider a natural convection problem, where we couple a fluid dynamics model and a temperature evolution model. In order to exploit the parallelism of operator splitting schemes, we propose to use the OpenPALM coupler tool for coupling individual model implementations. We carried out performance tests of the coupled models with a varying number of MPI processes and compared them to a standard implementation. Our results show that the coupling approach is superior over the standard implementation with respect to parallel efficiency, especially when using a higher number of MPI processes.