Multithreaded Acceleration of 3D Mathematical Model for Ore Sintering

Abstract

One of the widely used methods to accelerate a numerical solver is implementation of multithreading. The problem of thread allocation on-demand at runtime is latency, caused by periodical instantiation of threads. The article is devoted to parallelization of solver for 3D mathematical model of ore sintering, based on software threads reusing them during computation. Computational domain is equally shared among available threads. Each thread writes only to own data partition. A looped barrier is proposed for guaranteed synchronization of all threads after iteration. The method allows scaling performance without recompilation of the solver by using similar CPU with more cores. Measurement of solver performance with 220 nodes using different thread count confirms scalability around 95% for double and single precision arithmetics. Presented pictures of perspective view with three slices of temperature field show influence of heat loss from pallets walls. A cross section of temperature field in layer after 16 minutes of sintering is calculated with appearance of two high-temperature regions inside. Comparison of temperature field with literature data gives good correspondence. The computer model takes into account important chemical reactions, such as, coke burning, carbonate dissolution, water vaporization, as well as mass-heat transfer inside the sinter layer and can be used in metallurgical plants to increase effectiveness of sintering.