Direct Numerical Simulation of Particulate Flows on 294912 Processor Cores

This paper describes computational models for particle-laden flows based on a fully resolved fluid-structure interaction. The flow simulation uses the Lattice Boltzmann method, while the particles are handled by a rigid body dynamics algorithm. The particles can have individual non-spherical shapes, creating the need for a non-trivial collision detection and special contact models. An explicit coupling algorithm transfers momenta from the fluid to the particles in each time step, while the particles impose moving boundaries for the flow solver. All algorithms and their interaction are fully parallelized. Scaling experiments and a careful performance analysis are presented for up to 294912 processor cores of the Blue Gene at the Jülich Supercomputing center. The largest simulations involve 264 million particles that are coupled to a fluid which is simultaneously resolved by 150 billion cells for the Lattice Boltzmann method. The paper will conclude with a computational experiment for the segregation of suspensions of particles of different density, as an example of the many industrial applications that are enabled by this new methodology.