Beam-tracing domain decomposition method for urban acoustic pollution

Abstract: This paper covers the fast solution of large acoustic problems on low-resources parallel platforms. A domain decomposition method is coupled with a dynamic load balancing scheme to efficiently accelerate a geometrical acoustic method. The geometrical method studied implements a beam-tracing method where intersections are handled as in a ray-tracing method. Beyond the distribution of the global processing upon multiple sub-domains, a second parallelization level is operated by means of multi-threading and shared memory mechanisms. Numerical experiments show that this method allows to handle large scale open domains for parallel computing purposes on few machines. Urban acoustic pollution arrising from car traffic was simulated on a large model of the Shinjuku district of Tokyo, Japan. The good speed-up results illustrate the performance of this new domain decomposition method.