Exploring Parallelizing Frameworks for Fluid Simulation

Abstract

In this paper we present a comparison study of two widely used parallelizing frameworks on the CPU, namely, OpenMP and Intel Threading Building Blocks (TBB). The particular problem domain we apply to is a grid-based fluid simulation solver. The standard Eulerian grid-based fluid solver discretizes the Navier-Stokes equation on a staggered but regular grid and computes the fluid parameters like velocity and pressure in each grid cell. We use OpenMP and TBB to parallelize this computation, and study the behaviour of our implementation on each framework, while working with different number of threads and CPU cores. We provide arguments in support of implementing a mixed solution strategy using both the parallelizing frameworks together, thus improving performance over when either is used in isolation.