A scalable high-performance environment for fluid flow analysis on unstructured grids

Abstract

Describes an integrated environment for the analysis and solution of fluid flow problems, and contains a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver and a visualization system as its major components. The flow solver is capable of solving the Navier-Stokes equations about complex geometries through the use of unstructured solution-adaptable grids. Unlike post-processing visualization environments, the visualization system is designed to work in a co-processing mode with the CFD application. This significantly reduces data storage and data movement requirements for visualization and also allows the user to interactively steer the application. The solver and the visualization system have been implemented on massively parallel computers, multiple processor workstations and workstation clusters. The user can run the flow simulation on a remote compute server and interactively observe results and control the simulation from a desktop workstation. The system uses Scheme, a high-level interpreted language, for extending and customizing the environment from the textual user interface. Timings on a massively parallel processor (MPP) and on a workstation cluster are presented to demonstrate the solver's scalability, and a case study of the flow over an F-18 aircraft is included to illustrate how the environment is used on a real-world problem. >