Parallelization of finite volume computations for heat transfer application using unstructured mesh partitioning algorithms

An effective parallelization of finite volume computations for heat transfer application using unstructured triangular meshes and mesh partitioning algorithms are presented. The mesh partitioning software (METIS) is employed to create nearly load balanced subdomains and to minimize the interprocessor communications. Efficient data structures are developed to handle the neighboring element information at the interfaces of all subdomains and a simple strategy to overlap the computations to communications has been implemented for improving the performance of the program. The explicit time integration method is used and the results for the rectangular domain and L-shaped domain have been presented. The code (PHEAT2D) is written in Fortran90 and MPI for message passing is used. The algorithm is tested on distributed memory MIMD machine, PARAM OPENFRAME