Domain Decomposition Methods for the Parallel Computation of Reacting Flows

Abstract

Domain decomposition is a natural route to parallel computing for partial differential equation solvers. In this procedure, subdomains of which the original domain of definition is comprised are assigned to independent processors at the price of periodic coordination between processors to compute global parameters and maintain the requisite degree of continuity of the solution at the subdomain interfaces. In the domain-decomposed solution of steady multidimensional systems of PDEs by finite difference methods using a pseudo-transient version of Newton iteration, the only portion of the computation which generally stands in the way of efficient parallelization is the solution of the large, sparse linear systems arising at each Newton step. For some Jacobian matrices drawn from an actual two-dimensional reacting flow problem, we make comparisons between relaxation-based linear solvers and also preconditioned iterative methods of Conjugate Gradient and Chebyshev type, focusing attention on both iteration count and global inner product count. The three special features of reacting flow models in relation to these linear systems are: the possibly large number of degrees of freedom per gridpoint, the dominance of dense intra-point source-term coupling over interpoint convective- diffusive coupling throughout significant portions of the flow-field, and strong nonlinearities which restrict the time-step to small values (independent of linear algebraic considerations) throughout significant portions of the iteration history.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 01, 1988
Accession Number
ADA201250

Entities

People

  • David E. Keyes

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Boundary Value Problems
  • Chemical Reactions
  • Combustion
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Computational Science
  • Convection
  • Decomposition
  • Differential Equations
  • Engineering
  • Equations
  • Floating Point Operations
  • Fluid Dynamics
  • Geometry
  • Linear Systems
  • Parallel Computing
  • Partial Differential Equations
  • Two Dimensional

Fields of Study

  • Mathematics

Readers

  • Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
  • Finite Element Method (FEM) for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs)
  • Systems Analysis and Design