Coupled Thermo-Hydro-Mechanical Modelling: A New Parallel Approach

A hybrid MPI/OpenMP method of parallelising a bi-conjugate gradient iterative solver for coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical finite-element simulations in unsaturated soil is implemented and found to be efficient on modern parallel computers. In particular, a new method of parallelisation using a hybrid multi-threaded and message-passing approach depending on calculation size was implemented yielding better performance over more processing units. This was tested on both an Opteron 2218 2.6GHz Dual-Core processor based system with a Gigabit Ethernet interconnect and an Intel Xeon (Harpertown / Seaburg) 3.0GHz Quad-Core processor based system with an InfiniBand Connect-X interconnect. The impact of the experimental results reflect on the scalability of field-scale simulations with a higher resolution both spatially and temporally