Parallel Computation of the Flow of Integral Viscoelastic Fluids On a Heterogeneous Network of Workstations

We consider the parallel computation of flows of integral fluids on a heterogeneous network of workstations. The proposed methodology is relevant to computational mechanics problems which involve a compute-intensive treatment of internal variables (e.g. fibre suspension flow and deformation of viscoplastic solids). The main parallel computing issue in such applications is that of load balancing. Both static and dynamic allocation of work to processors are considered in the present paper. The proposed parallel algorithms have been implemented in an experimental, parallel version of the commercial POLYFLOW package developed in Louvain-la-Neuve. The implementation uses the public domain PVM software library (Parallel Virtual Machine), which we have extended in order to ease porting to heterogeneous networks. We describe parallel efficiency results obtained with three PVM configurations, involving up to seven workstations with maximum relative processing speeds of five. The physical problems are the stick/slip and abrupt contraction flows of a K.B.K.Z. integral fluid. Using static allocation, parallel efficiencies in the range 67%-85% were obtained on a PVM network with four workstations having relative speeds of 2:1:1:1. Parallel efficiencies higher than 90% were obtained on the three PVM configurations using the dynamic load-balancing schemes