Massively parallel finite volume computation of three-dimensional thermal convective flows

A parallel implementation of the finite volume method for three-dimensional, time-dependent, thermal convective flows is presented. The algebraic equations resulting from the finite volume discretization are solved by a parallel multigrid method. A flexible parallel code has been implemented on distributed-memory systems, by using domain decomposition techniques and the MPI communication software. The code uses one-, two- or three-dimensional partition according to different geometries. It currently runs on the Intel Paragon, the Gray T3D, T3E, the IBM SP2 and the Beowulf systems, which can be ported easily to other parallel systems. A comparison of the wallclock time of the code between these systems is made, and code performances with respect to different numbers of processors are presented. Published by Elsevier Science Limited.