Runtime Support and Dynamic Load Balancing Strategies for Structured Adaptive Applications

One class of scientific and engineering applications involves structured meshes. One example of a code in this class is a flame modelling code developed at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). The numerical model used in the NRL flame code is predominantly based on structured finite volume methods. The chemistry process of the reactive flow is modeled by a system of ordinary differential equations which is solved independently at each grid point. Thus, though the model uses a mesh structure, the workload at each grid point can vary considerably. It is this feature that requires the use of both structured and unstructured methods in the same code. We have applied the Multiblock PARTI and CHAOS runtime support libraries to parallelize the NRL flame code with minimal changes to the sequential code. We have also developed parallel algorithms to carry out dynamic load balancing. It has been observed that the overall performance scales reasonably up to 256 Paragon processors and that the tot..