Research in Parallel Algorithms and Software for Computational Aerosciences

https://doi.org/10.21949/14040091996PDFResearch PaperReport NAS-96-004Computer algorithmsComputer architectureComputer programmingParallel processingProgramming (Mathematics)Mainframe computersComputer networksCartesian grid techniquesComputational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) parallel codeParallel Virtual Machine (PVM)SPLITFLOWDomel, Neal D.Lockheed Martin. Tactical Aircraft SystemsAmes Research CenterNTL-AVIATION-AVIATIONUS Transportation CollectionPhase I is complete for the development of a Computational Fluid Dynamicswith automatic grid generation and adaptation for the Euleranalysis of flow over complex geometries. SPLITFLOW, an unstructured Cartesiangrid code developed at Lockheed Martin Tactical Aircraft Systems, has beenmodified for a distributed memory/massively parallel computer environment. Theparallel code is operational on an SGI network, Cray J90 and C90 vector machines.SGI Power Challenge, and Cray T3D and IBM SP2 massively parallel machines.Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) is the message passing protocol for portabilityto various architectures. A domain decomposition technique was developed whichenforces dynamic load balancing to improve solution speed and memory requirements.A host/node algorithm distributes the tasks. The solver parallelizes verywell, and scales with the number of processors. Partially parallelized andnonparallelized tasks consume most of the wall clock time in a very fine grainenvironment. Timing comparisons on a Cray C90 demonstrate that ParallelSPLITFLOW runs 2.4 times faster on 8 processors than its non-parallelcounterpart autotasked over 8 processors. Funded by NASA Ames ResearchCenter under contract NAS2-14057.84