Asynchronous Hybrid Parallel SpMV in an Industrial Application

Pore-scale simulation is both computationally challenging and a key element of hydrocarbon exploration and production ([1], [2], [3]). The subject of this study is the efficient solution of the linear systems arising from the discretization of the Cahn-Hilliard equation ([4], [5]), which governs the separation of a two-component fluid mixture. We investigate synchronous and asynchronous parallel iterative solvers for our simulation. We focus our efforts on two main aspects: first, software infrastructure that supports this kind of computations, mainly Trilinos and GaspiLS. Second, scalability and performance analysis. The asynchronous solver performs well and scales better than the synchronous ones for most test problems, especially for large systems distributed over many computational nodes (up to 23% faster and 10% higher parallel efficiency in these cases).