A parallel multilevel preconditioned iterative pressure Poisson solver for the large-eddy simulation of turbulent flow inside a duct

Turbulent Poiseuille flows inside the square duct are simulated by the large-eddy simulation based on the multilevel Schwarz preconditioned conjugate gradient pressure Poisson solver, which was developed on top of the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PESTc). The impact of the five different matrix reordering techniques for an incomplete LU (ILU) decomposition as a subdomain solver on the overall performance of Schwarz-type preconditioners for the solution of the pressure Poisson equation are studied. The numerical results indicate that ILU of two-level fill-ins with the reverse Cuthill–McKee matrix ordering technique produces the best performance. Further investigation on the parallel performance of different multilevel methods was also conducted for two different problem sizes. It was observed that the computational cost saturates at around six-level for both the problem sizes explored. Also, though the one-level method is better for small problem size, for the larger problem size, the six-level method performs best in terms of scalability and compute time; hence, the benefit of a multilevel method is more obviously.