Parallelization and integration of fire simulations in the Uintah PSE

Journal ArticleA physics-based stand-alone serial code for fire simulations is integrated in a unified computational framework to couple with other disciplines and to achieve massively parallel computation. Uintah, the computational framework used, is a component-based visual problem-solving environment developed at the University of Utah. It provides the framework for large-scale parallelization for different applications. The integration of the legacy fire code in Uintah is built on three principles: 1)Develop different reusable physics-based components that can be used interchangeably and interact with other components, 2) reuse the legacy stand-alone fire code (written in Fortran) as much as possible, and 3) use components developed by third parties, specifically non-linear and linear solvers designed for solving complex-flow problems. A helium buoyant plume is simulated using the Nirvana machine at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Linear scalability is achieved up to 128 processors. Issues related to scaling beyond 128 processors are also discussed