Impact of mesh partitioning methods in CFD for large scale parallel computing

• Qualitatively study the effects of mesh partitioning methods on HPC.
• Quantitatively study the effects of mesh partitioning methods on HPC.
• Practically study effects of mesh partitioning methods on HPC for massive meshes.

It was well known that high performance computing depends on load balance and mesh cell distributions. A well balanced load can improve efficiency of parallel computing and minimizing the number of cells with remote neighbors can reduce the time spent on the data communication among processors. Mesh partitioning methods were able to optimize the mesh cell distributions for large scale parallel computing. In this paper, the open source mesh partitioning software packages, such as Metis, ParMetis, Scotch, PT-Scotch and Zoltan, were ported into Code_Saturne, which is an open source CFD software package, for realizing the optimization on large scale CFD applications. Through the studies, it was found that the mesh partitioning methods strongly affect the CFD code on high performance computing especially for large scale parallel computing.