Preliminary Studies with Pvm on a Hp-735 Cluster and Cm-5 for the Time Dependent Solution of the Incompressible Navier- Stokes Equations - Laplace Equation By

2 ABSTRACT A preliminary study was conducted with the message passing library PVM for the iterative solution of a two-dimensional Laplace equation. A line iterative procedure and Stone's strongly implicit solution procedure were tested in this environment as they have direct applicability to the solution of the pressure-Poisson equation. The intent of this study was not so much to study the solution of the Laplace equation as it was to establish the necessary groundwork and to understand the issues involved in parallel programming in a domain-decomposed environment for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. Two machine configurations were looked at in this study, a 6 processor HP-735 cluster at NCSA and a 512 processor CM-5. There were some differences in the F77 compilers between the two machines and suitable modifications had to be made in the computer program. It was found that although the Stone's method did not parallelize as effectively as the line iterative procedure, it took much less CPU time to give a converged solution.