Parallelisation of a Geothermal Simulation Package: A Case Study on Four Multicore Architectures.

Abstract

An OpenMP-based approach to parallelise a geothermal simulation package is investigated. Like its predecessor SHEMAT, the new simulation software is capable of solving the coupled transient equations for groundwater flow and heat transport. The overall parallelisation strategy consists of an incremental approach to parallelise the most time-consuming tasks: the assembly and the solution of two coupled systems of linear equations. We compare the parallel performance on recent dual- and quad-core architectures based on various Xeon and Opteron processors. The case study demonstrates that it is possible to obtain good speedups for a moderate number of threads with only modest human effort.