Trilinos Solvers Scalability on a MFiX-Trilinos Framework Applied to Fluidized Bed Simulations

Abstract MFiX is a multiphase open-source suite that is developed at the National Energy Technology Laboratories. It is widely used by fossil fuel reactor communities to simulate flow in a fluidized bed reactor. It does not have advanced linear iterative solvers even though it spends 70% of the run time in solving the linear system. Trilinos contains algorithms and enabling technologies for the solution of large-scale, sophisticated multi-physics engineering and scientific problems. The library developed at Sandia National Laboratories has more than 60 packages. It consists of state-of-the-art preconditioners, nonlinear solvers, direct solvers, and iterative solvers. The packages are performant and portable on various hybrid computing architectures. To improve the capabilities of MFiX, we developed a framework, MFiX-Trilinos, to integrate the advanced linear solvers in Trilinos with the FORTRAN based multiphase flow solver, MFiX. The framework changes the semantics of the array in FORTRAN and C++ and solve the linear system with packages in Trilinos and returns the solution to MFiX. The preconditioned iterative solvers considered for the analysis are BiCGStab and GMRES. The framework is verified on various fluidized bed problems. The performance of the framework is tested on the Stampede supercomputer. The wall time for multiple sizes of fluidized beds is compared.