Parallel smoothing pressure correction solver for biomedical flow problems: convergence criteria, preconditioning, scalability

A fast, parallel flow solver based on a pressure-correction approach is analysed. It is especially suitable for biomedical flow problems due to the use of unstructured meshes and the ability to tackle large problems. The original smoothing pressure correction method was enhanced by parallelisation, efficient linear solvers, and the introduction of a generic linear stopping criterion. The solver was verified and its accuracy demonstrated by means of a range reference benchmarks, and its applicability to biomedical problems was demonstrated by simulating transient blood flow in the human aortic bifurcation. Scalability was investigated on a Cray XT5. High parallel efficiency could be achieved when solving the momentum equations with scalable low-cost preconditioning. Computationally more expensive multigrid preconditioning proved to be advantageous when solving the pressure correction equation, but restricted scalability to a range of up to 30 computing cores.