Parallel Simulation of Fluid Slip in a Microchannel

Jingyu Zhou, Luoding Zhu, Linda Petzold, and Tao Yang


This paper investigates the parallel simulation of fluid slip along
microchannel walls using the multicomponent lattice Boltzmann method
(LBM) with domain decomposition. Because of the high complexity for
microscale simulation, even a parallel computation of fluid slip can
take days or weeks.  Any slowness in the participating nodes in a cluster
can drag the entire computation substantially, due to frequent node
synchronization involved in each computational phase of the algorithm.
We augment the parallel LBM algorithm with filtered dynamic remapping
for lattice points.  This filtered  scheme uses lazy remapping and
over-redistribution strategies to balance the computational speed of
participating nodes and to minimize the performance impact of slow
nodes on synchronized phases.  Our experimental results indicate that
the proposed technique can greatly speed up fluid slip simulation on
a non-dedicated cluster over a long period of execution time.