Reducing the memory footprint in Large Eddy Simulations of reactive flows

• RAM/core is a critical value for coupled CFD chemistry applications.
• Two implementation options are proposed to share chemistry LUTs on compute nodes.
• Two test cases show: memory usage is reduced significantly using any implementation.
• Runtime is larger using MPI-3 based implementation compared to MMAP system call.

CFD simulations of reactive flows couple the domains of flame chemistry and computational fluid dynamics. Solving the chemistry domain in-situ is extremely demanding. It is therefore calculated beforehand and stored into a Look-up table (LUT), which is loaded in each MPI-based CFD application process in a parallel simulation. These chemistry database files can become very large when including many variables and solution values, putting a limit on the number of CFD mesh points as well as the solver instances which can be kept in RAM at the same time. In the paper we approach this problem using dynamic memory managing techniques for single core and parallel applications effectively reducing the memory requirements per core, while keeping the same database resolution. Different implementation options for shared memory on compute nodes provided by the MPI-3 standard and MMAP as a POSIX-compliant system call are analyzed and evaluated using two test cases.