PARALLEL COMPUTATIONS OF RADIATIVE HEAT TRANSFER USING THE DISCRETE ORDINATES METHOD

ABSTRACT The discrete ordinates method is spatially decomposed to solve the radiative transport equation on parallel computers. Mathematical libraries developed by third parties are used to solve the matrices that result during the solution procedure. The radiation component is verified by comparing computed values against a benchmark. Fixed and scaled problem size efficiencies are examined. Contrary to most previous studies, the parallel efficiencies did not depend strongly on the optical thickness of the medium for our model problem. Timing studies show that GMRES, BiCGSTAB iterative methods with block Jacobi preconditioning perform the best for solving these matrix systems.