A Grid-based Flow Analysis and Investigation of Load Balance in Heterogeneous Computing Environment

Abstract

According to Moores law, computer speed doubles in every 18 months. In accordance with the development of computational environment, the problem size in CFD(Computational Fluid Dynamics) has been enormously expanded. However, even now, a lot of problems require too huge computational power to be analyzed using local computing resources. As an alternative proposal, the concept Grid was planned and is on research now. It is obvious that the Grid enables a researcher to analyze a huge-sized problem(e.g. an integral analysis and flow analysis of an airplane). However, diverse communication speed among computing resources and heterogeneity of computing resources can reduce parallel efficiency in the Grid. Therefore, the present research focuses on the effective flow calculation in the Grid. As an analysis of a huge-sized problem, flowfield around a launch vehicle with two strap-on boosters including base region is analyzed. For an efficient load distribution, performances of all computing resources in the Grid are investigated and, on the basis of performance test results, the whole job is distributed explicitly. As an investigation of load balance in the Grid, a simple load balance algorithm is proposed and applied to the flow calculation around a tangent ogive-cylinder. The proposed algorithm distributes the whole job considering the performance of each processor and communication speed between processors. And the application shows a validity of proposed algorithm.