On Grid Partitioning for a High Performance Groundwater Simulation Software

The partitioning of a discretized computational domain is fundamental for solving many application problems on parallel high performance computer systems. This is also the key to work load balancing and minimizing communication overhead. This contribution focus on partitioning of real application problems for the parallel TOUGH2 software. TOUGH2 is a widely used reservoir simulator for solving subsurface ow related problems. It solves a set of coupled mass and energy balance equations using a nite volume method. The application problems considered are from the Yucca Mountain study for a potential repository of civilian nuclear waste. The quality of the partitions produced by three algorithms in the METIS package are analyzed. Performance results are presented for up to 512 processors on Cray T3E-900.