Large Scale Simulation of Suspensions with PVM

We describe an application of an indirect boundary element method in the large scale simulation of suspensions in distributed environment with Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM). The method involves re-casting the governing (Stokes or Navier) equations in an integral form which is suitable for iterative solution. Parallelization is achieved by domain decomposition, in which the calculations on a group of particles are farmed out to a workstation in a distributed system. The actual throughput of the distributed farm, consisting of 28 DEC AlphaStations 500/266, based on a wall clock measurement and an actual floating point operation count for the serial version of the program, is 4.69 Gflops/s. This results in a price performance of 65 USD per Mflops/s.