A Methodology for CFD Acceleration through Reconfigurable Hardware

The long computation times required to simulate complete aircraft con¯gurations re- main as the main bottleneck in the design °ow of new structures for the aeronautics in- dustry. In this paper, the novel application of speci¯c hardware (FPGAs) in conjunction with conventional processors to accelerate CFD is explored in detail. First, some general facts about application-speci¯c hardware are presented, placing the focus on the feasibil- ity of the development of hardware modules (FPGAs based) for the acceleration of most time-consuming algorithms in aeronautics analysis. Then, a practical methodology for de- veloping an FPGA-based computing solution for the quasi 1D Euler equations is applied to the Sod's 'Shock Tube' problem. Results comparing CPU-based and FPGA-based solutions are presented, showing that speedups around two orders of magnitude can be expected from the FPGA-based implementation. Finally, some conclusions about this novel approach are drawn