A comparative study of the use of the data-parallel approach for compressible flow calculations

Abstract

The results are presented of an investigation into the use of the data-parallel programming approach on four different massively-parallel computers: the MasPar MP-1 and MP-2 and the Thinking Machines CM-200 and CM-5. A code to calculate inviscid compressible flow, originally written in FORTRAN 77 for a traditional vector computer, has been re-written entirely in Fortran 90 to take advantage of the compilers available on the massively-parallel computers. It is shown that the discretization of the governing equations on a regular mesh is well adapted to data parallelism. For a typical test problem of supersonic flow through a ramped duct, computational speeds have been achieved using these massively-parallel computers that are superior to those obtained using a single processor of a Cray Y-MP. In addition, this study has enabled the question of code portability between the different computers to be assessed.