A Parallel Implementation of a Fluid Flow Simulation using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics

Keith Vertanen

Master's thesis, Oregon State University, 1999.

The reaction of fluid or gas flowing around an obstacle is a common engineering problem. Computer simulations are often used to measure and visualize the physical processes involved. In this report, we will discuss a parallel implementation of a simulation using the Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) approach to fluid flow. We will discuss the design decisions made during development, problems encountered during implementation, and parallel performance issues.

Section 2 will introduce the fluid flow problem, the SPH technique, and our project motivations. Section 3 will discuss our first O(N2) serial version of the simulator. Section 4 covers our improved O(N) grid-based serial version. In section 5, we will develop the MPI parallel simulation, discuss debugging issues, and provide results from our performance tuning. Section 6 describes our Java application client used to control the simulation. In section 7, the Java/C++ socket library used for communication with the client is discussed. We will conclude in section 8 with an evaluation of our successes and failures during the project and look at future directions for this work.