Parallel Performance Analysis of Bacterial Biofilm Simulation Models

Modelling and simulation of bacterial biofilms is a computationally expensive process necessitating use of parallel computing. Fluid dynamics and advection-consumption models can be decoupled and solved to handle the fluid-solute-bacterial interactions. Data exchange between the two processes add up to the communication overheads. The heterogenous distribution of bacteria within the simulation domain further leads to non-uniform load distribution in the parallel system. We study the effect of load imbalance and communication overheads on the overall performance of simulation at different stages of biofilm growth. We develop a model to optimize the parallelization procedure for computing the growth dynamics of bacterial biofilms.

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