Performance Study of GasTurbnLab, an Agent-Based Multi-Physics Problem Solving Environment for the Gas Turbine Engine Simulation

Abstract

Multiphysics applications are real world problems with a large number of different shape components that obey different physical laws and manufacturing constraints and interact with each other through geometric and physical interfaces. They demand accurate and efficient solutions and a modern type of computational modeling, which designs the whole physical system with as much detail as possible. The simulation of gas turbine engine is such a multiphysics application and is realized with GasTurbnLab, an agent-based Multiphysics Problem Solving Environment (MPSE). Its performance and evaluation study is presented in this paper. For this, a short description of the software components and hardware infrastructure is given. The performance and the scalability of the parallelism are depicted, and the communication overhead between agents is studied with respect to the number of agents and their location in the “computational grid.” The execution time is recorded, and its analysis verifies the complexity of the solvers in use and the performance of the available hardware. Three different clusters of INTEL Pentium processors were used for experimentation to study how the communication time was affected by processor’s homogeneity/heterogeneity and the different connections between the processors. The study of the numerical experiments shows that the domain decomposition and interface relaxation methodology, along with the usage of agent platforms, does not increase the complexity of the simulation problem, and the communication cost is too low, compared with the computations, to reflect on the total simulation time. Therefore, GasTurbnLab is an efficient example of a complex physical phenomena simulation.