February Module of the Month: ALL library implementation in HemeLB, a CoE collaboration

 

This module describes the work done in E-CAM in cooperation with the HemeLB code from the CompBioMed Centre of Excellence.

HemeLB is a high performance lattice-Boltzmann solver optimised for simulating blood flow through sparse geometries, such as those found in the human vasculature. The code is used within the CompBioMed HPC Centre of Excellence H2020 project and is already highly optimised for HPC usage. Nevertheless, in an E-CAM workshop on the load balancing library ALL hosted at the Juelich Supercomputing Centre, a cooperation was set up in order to analyse and test whether the use of ALL could improve the existing scalability of the code.

ALL was designed to work with particle codes, therefore it was interesting to apply the library to a lattice-Boltzmann solver, which usually is not particle-based. The different grid points of the solution grid were designated as particles and since each of the grid-points already was assigned a workload, the sum of grid-point workloads could be used as domain work load.

As a result, it was demonstrated that the domain compositions provided by ALL show a better theoretical load distribution. Tests to check if this translates into better code performance are inconclusive as yet, due to hardware related issues on the testing platforms. However, these are currently under further investigation, and more definitive results about the performance of the ALL-provided domain decompositions can be expected in the near future. The results were part of an article about HemeLB, which was published in 2020[1] .

Documentation and source code

https://e-cam.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Meso-Multi-Scale-Modelling-Modules/modules/ALL_library/all_hemeLB_cooperation/hemeLBcooperation.html


References

Towards blood flow in the virtual human: efficient self-coupling of HemeLB
J. W. S. McCullough, R. A. Richardson, A. Patronis, R. Halver, R. Marshall, M. Ruefenacht, B. J. N. Wylie, T. Odaker, M. Wiedemann, B. Lloyd, E. Neufeld, G. Sutmann, A. Skjellum, D. Kranzlmüller and P. V. Coveney
Interface Focus 2020, 11: 20190119
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2019.0119 (open access)

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