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Saras - Finite difference solver

License DOI

SARAS is an MPI parallelized Navier-Stokes equation solver written in C++. It uses the finite-difference method for calculating spatial derivatives and parallelized geometric multi-grid method for solving the pressure Poisson equation.

All the relevant files of the solver are contained in the following directories:

  • ./src/ - contains the different solvers available in SARAS
  • ./lib/ - contains all the libraries used by the solvers in ./src/ folder
  • ./input/ - contains the parameters to be read by the solver
  • ./output/ - the solution files are written into this folder, it also contains Python post-processing scripts

Installing SARAS

SARAS relies on a few libraries for its calculations. Therefore the first step towards building SARAS is to install the following dependencies:

  • cmake - Necessary to build the saras executable
  • mpich - For parallel computation using MPI
  • hdf5 - The output files are written in HDF5 format
  • blitz - All array manipulations are performed using the Blitz++ library
  • yaml-cpp - The input parameters are stored in a YAML file which needs to be parsed using yaml-cpp library.

Packages like cmake, mpich, and hdf5 can be installed from the OS package manager. However, the latest versions of blitz and yaml-cpp packages can be downloaded from GitHub as described below.

If you do not have sudo privileges to install packages using the OS package manager, you can install them in your home folder instead. This also offers the potential advantage of not disturbing pre-existing packages already installed on the system. The steps listed below explain this method of installation.

That said, libraries like cmake, MPICH and HDF5 are normally available on most computing systems. Please check if these packages are already installed, and if they are, you can skip their installation steps.

Download all the dependencies

All the required packages can be downloaded and installed over a terminal. It is advisable to create a temporary directory where the packages can be downloaded and extracted. After navigating to the temporary directory, download the packages using wget command on Linux, or curl command on MacOS. CMake, MPICH and HDF5 packages can be downloaded from their respective sites, and extracted by the tar command.

wget https://cmake.org/files/v3.12/cmake-3.12.4.tar.gz
wget http://www.mpich.org/static/downloads/3.4.2/mpich-3.4.2.tar.gz
wget https://support.hdfgroup.org/ftp/HDF5/releases/hdf5-1.8/hdf5-1.8.21/src/hdf5-1.8.21.tar.gz

tar -xf cmake-3.12.4.tar.gz
tar -xf mpich-3.4.2.tar.gz
tar -xf hdf5-1.8.21.tar.gz

On Mac OS, please replace wget with curl -O. It is best to download the latest versions of Blitz++ and yaml-cpp from their respective Git repositories.

git clone https://github.com/jbeder/yaml-cpp.git
git clone https://github.com/blitzpp/blitz.git

If you are installing on a remote machine which doesn't have direct internet access, the packages can be downloaded using the links listed above, and transferred over ssh or ftp.

On MacOS, if the tar command fails with the error Failed to set default locale, the $LANG environment variable has to be set. For this you need to execute the command: export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Once all the downloaded packages have been extracted, create an install location in your home folder if it doesn't exist already. Usually, packages are installed in $HOME/local/ directory. The next steps will assume that the folder local/ exists in the user's home directory.

Install CMake

After navigating to the folder created by extracting the CMake package, execute the following commands to configure the installation script and install the package:

./configure --prefix=$HOME/local
make -j4 install

Note that the option -j4 given to make will use 4 cores of your system. If more cores are available, the process can be speeded-up by specifying a higher number.

Export path variables

Once CMake has been installed in $HOME/local it should be made available for the next steps of installation. For this, the path variables have to be updated to let the system know that cmake is installed in $HOME/local. Accordingly, set the following environment variables:

export PATH=$HOME/local/bin:$PATH
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$HOME/local/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH
export CPATH=$HOME/local/include/:$CPATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/local/lib:$LIBRARY_PATH
export MANPATH=$HOME/local/share/man/:$MANPATH

Please note that the environment variables set here exist only for the duration of the terminal session. If the session is terminated by closing the terminal or logging out, the variables will be reset. To permanently add the path variables, the above lines may be appended to the shell profile file (like bashrc or bash_profile).

Install yaml-cpp

Installing the yaml-cpp package will require cmake. It is best to build the package within a temporary build/ directory to avoid disturbing the source files. After navigating to the folder created by cloning the yaml-cpp repository, execute the following steps:

mkdir build
cd build/
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/local ../
make -j4 install

With cmake, the -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX argument performs the same function as --prefix for make, namely specifying the install directory.

SARAS is now compatible with the latest versions of yaml-cpp. The older yaml-cpp 0.3 uses YAML::Parser::GetNextDocument to parse the YAML file. However, this function is not secure and hence deprecated in later versions. If you have an older version of yaml-cpp installed on your system, you can still run SARAS with the older package. To enable this, the user has to pass the -DYAML_LEGACY flag to CMake when building SARAS later.

Install MPICH

Similar to the installation of CMake, MPICH also uses a configure script to install the package. After navigating to the folder created by extracting the mpich tarball, configure and install the package as done before:

./configure --prefix=$HOME/local
make -j4 install

If the configure step throws the error The Fortran compiler gfortran will not compile files that call the same routine with arguments of different types., please set the following flag, and rerun the configure script.

export FFLAGS="-w -fallow-argument-mismatch -O2"

Install Blitz++

Although older versions of Blitz used a configure script to build the package, the latest versions use CMake instead. Similar to the installation of yaml-cpp, you will have to build the package within a temporary build/ directory. After navigating to the folder created by cloning the blitz repository, execute the following commands:

mkdir build
cd build/
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/local ../
make -j4 install

The latest version of CMake is required to build the blitz package. If the above steps fail due to CMake version mismatch, you will have to upgrade your CMake. If you installed CMake as done in the steps above, you will not face this issue, since the latest version of CMake was downloaded for the installation process described above.

At the final step in make install, the Blitz++ installer may require python2. If you encounter an error due to Python version mismatch, please switch the environment to use python2 temporarily for this step of the installation.

Install HDF5 library

The HDF5 library requires MPICH so that it can perform parallel file I/O operations. Hence it must be installed only after installing MPICH (if MPICH was not already available on your system). A few additional build flags are also provided when building the HDF5 library:

CC=mpicc CXX=mpicxx ./configure --prefix=$HOME/local --enable-parallel --without-zlib
make -j4 install

Note that while building the HDF5 library, it is being explicitly specified that the MPI compiler must be used. On some systems, it might be necessary to add an extra compiler flag before running make in order to install HDF5 properly:

export CFLAGS=-Wno-error=implicit-function-declaration

Clone and install SARAS

With luck, the above steps will have installed all the dependencies required by SARAS. Now the saras repository can be cloned into your machine:

git clone https://github.com/roshansamuel/saras.git

After navigating to the folder created by cloning the repository, you can follow the same steps for building the package as done when installing Blitz, yaml-cpp, etc.

mkdir build
cd build/
CC=mpicc CXX=mpicxx cmake ../
make -j4

CMake will build the saras executable in the root folder of the solver. The following flags can be passed to CMake to enable/disable different features of SARAS:

  • -DPLANAR=ON - This compiles SARAS for 2D simulations. By default, SARAS is compiled for 3D runs
  • -DREAL_SINGLE=ON - SARAS can compute in single-precision. By default, SARAS uses double-precision
  • -DTIME_RUN=ON - This flag suppresses file-writing and I/O when compiling the solver for scaling studies
  • -DYAML_LEGACY=ON - As described previously, this flag allows SARAS to use older versions of yaml-cpp

For example, to build SARAS for a 2D simulation using single-precision calculations, the solver will be configured as:

CC=mpicc CXX=mpicxx cmake -DPLANAR=ON -DREAL_SINGLE=ON ../

Note that the MPI compilers have to be specified to CMake for the MPI headers to be found when building the executable.

Running SARAS

SARAS can be executed by issuing the mpirun command at the root folder of the solver.

mpirun -np <number_of_processors> ./saras

It is essential to set the parameters appropriately with the parameters.yaml file in the input/ folder of the solver. The number of processors specified to the mpirun command should be equal to the product of X Number of Procs and Y Number of Procs options within the Parallel sub-section of parameters.yaml. Please check the parameters.yaml file for the full list of options specifiable to the solver, and their explanations (in comments).

For more information please refer to the SARAS documentation.

Testing SARAS

SARAS offers an automated testing process to validate the solver after installation. The relevant test scripts can be found in the tests/ folder of the solver. Executing the Bash shell script testLDC.sh, will compile SARAS, and run it with a pre-defined set of parameters. We use the benchmark results on 2D lid-driven cavity (LDC) performed by Ghia et al (1982) to validate SARAS. The test can be executed by running the following command within the tests/ folder.

bash testLDC.sh

The test uses 4 cores and takes about 12 minutes to complete on an Intel workstation. At the end of the test, the Python script checkLDC.py, found in tests/ldcTest/ reads the output, and plots the velocity profiles along with the data from Ghia et al's result.

The following Python modules are necessary for the Python test script to execute successfully

  • numpy
  • scipy
  • matplotlib
  • h5py
  • yaml

At the end of the test, a plot of the x and y velocity profiles is shown to the user and saved as ldc_validation.png in the folder tests/ldcTest/. Additionally, the convergence of the multi-grid Poisson solver of SARAS can also be tested. This test is also available in the tests/ folder.

Setting up a new case in SARAS

After generating the saras executable file as described in the section on Installing SARAS, The executable has to be placed in a folder with two sub-folders: input/ and output/. SARAS will read parameters from the input/ folder, and write solution data into the output/ folder.

Set the parameters file

The parameters of a case to be simulated with SARAS are specified in a YAML file named parameters.yaml. The user must set these parameters appropriately before executing saras.

A sample parameters.yaml file is provided with the solver in the ./input/ folder. The parameters are grouped under 5 sections, viz., Program, Mesh, Parallel, Solver and Multigrid.

  • The main parameters that set the boundary conditions, initial conditions, forcing/source terms, etc. are found under the Program section.
  • Grid parameters like number of points, stretching parameter for non-uniform grids, etc. are found under the Mesh section.
  • Parallel section lets the user define how many MPI sub-domains to decompose the computational domain.
  • Non-dimensional time-step, file write intervals, final non-dimensional time and so on are set in the Solver section.
  • Finally, Multigrid section lets the user tweak the parameters of the Geometric Multi-grid solver used to solve the pressure Poisson equation.

Each parameter has documentation written into the parameters.yaml file itself.

Additionally, the user can add custom boundary conditions to the boundary library. The source files of the boundary library can be found in ./lib/boundary folder of the solver. Similarly, the user can add custom initial conditions to the initial library in the ./lib/initial/ folder, and custom forcing/source terms to the force library in ./lib/force/. All the source files in these libraries have extensive Doxygen documentation, and are written to be as self-explanatory as possible.

Running and processing data

The solver will write the solution data files into ./output/ folder. Based on the values in parameters.yaml, the solver may write solution data, time series, probe measurements, etc. in this folder. The solver will also periodically dump the entire field data into a file named restartFile.h5. This file will be read by the solver to resume computations, should it stop before completing the simulation.

The solution data is written in HDF5 format, while time-series and probe data are written in ASCII format. Many open source visualization software are capable of reading HDF5 data format. Moreover, Python can also read HDF5 files using the h5py module.

License

SARAS is an open-source package made available under the New BSD License.

Contributions and bug reports

Contributions to this project are very welcome. If you wish to contribute, please create a branch with a pull request and the proposed changes can be discussed there.

If you find a bug, please open a new issue on the GitHub repository to report the bug. Please provide sufficient information for the bug to be reproduced.

References

Various articles and pages used to make programming decisions during development of the solver are listed here:

General articles

  1. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4816698/avoiding-circular-dependencies-of-header-files
  2. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8111677/what-is-argument-dependent-lookup-aka-adl-or-koenig-lookup
  3. https://www.codesynthesis.com/~boris/blog/2012/04/04/when-provide-empty-destructor/

Articles on multi-grid methods

  1. http://math.mit.edu/classes/18.086/2006/am63.pdf
  2. http://www.mgnet.org/mgnet-tuts.html

Journal references

  1. Ghia, U., Ghia, K. N., & Shin, C. T. (1982). High-Re solutions for incompressible flow using the Navier-Stokes equations and a multigrid method. J. Comput. Phys., 48(3), 387-411.