Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 2015, Computer Science and Engineering
Many scientific simulation codes represent physical systems by storing data
at a set of discrete points. For example, a weather modeling software application
may store data representing temperature, wind velocity, air pressure, humidity,
etc. at a set of points in the atmosphere over a portion of the Earth's surface.
Similarly, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software stores data representing
fluid velocity, pressure, etc. at discrete points in the domain of the particular
problem being solved. In many simulations, this set of discrete points is
a structured grid; i.e., a finite n-dimensional regular lattice.
One of the most important steps in many scientific simulations is the solution
of a system of linear equations, where the unknowns of the system correspond
to data elements at each of the discrete points used to model the system.
If the simulation is based on a structured grid, this linear system will
often have a special structure itself, and this structure may lead to
more efficient techniques for solving the system than can be used for
general sparse linear systems.
Scientific simulations most often use an iterative technique such as
the Conjugate Gradient Method or GMRES for solving linear systems..
It is well known that these iterative
techniques converge much more quickly if a preconditioner is used. The ILU,
or Incomplete LU Factorization, preconditioner is a good choice but it is
not parallelizable is a straightforward way.
This thesis examines techniques for parallelizing the application of the ILU
preconditioner to linear systems arising from scientific simulations on structured grids.
Various techniques are tested and timing results are recorded for different types and
sizes of linear systems on structured grids.
Committee: P Sadayappan (Advisor); Atanas Rountev (Committee Member)
Subjects: Computer Science