Advances in Computational Fluid Dynamics Solvers for Modern Computing Environments

摘要

EM Photonics has been investigating the application of massively multicore processors to a key problem area: Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). While the capabilities of CFD solvers have continually increased and improved to support features such as moving bodies and adjoint-based mesh adaptation, the software architecture has often lagged behind. This has led to poor scaling as core counts reach the tens of thousands. In the modern High Performance Computing (HPC) world, clusters with hundreds of thousands of cores are becoming the standard. In addition, accelerator devices such as NVIDIA GPUs and Intel Xeon Phi are being installed in many new systems. It is important for CFD solvers to take advantage of the new hardware as the computations involved are well suited for the massively multicore architecture. In our work, we demonstrate that new features in NVIDIA GPUs are able to empower existing CFD solvers by example using AVUS, a CFD solver developed by the Air Force Research Labratory (AFRL) and the Volcanic Ash Advisory Center (VAAC). The effort has resulted in increased performance and scalability without sacrificing accuracy. There are many well-known codes in the CFD space that can benefit from this work, such as FUN3D, OVERFLOW, and TetrUSS. Such codes are widely used in the commercial, government, and defense sectors.