Use of High Performance Computing to Conduct Fine Scale Numerical Simulations of Atmospheric Flow in Complex Terrain

摘要

Numerous observational and modeling studies have revealed a wide variety of atmospheric flows around, through and above terrain obstacles. Most such studies, however, have considered fairly simple terrain such as an isolated summit or an infinite perpendicular barrier exposed to uniform or relatively simple atmospheric conditions. Real terrain and real atmospheric conditions are considerably more complex than those used in the above mentioned studies and the resulting atmospheric flow is even more complicated and diverse. This paper highlights the results from a series of high resolution (1.0 km grid spacing) numerical simulations using the National Taiwan University (NTU)/Purdue model for a variety of flow situations such as hydraulic jump, lee waves, juxtaposition of supercritical and sub-critical flows, etc. To complete these computations in a reasonable amount of time, the NTU/Purdue model simulations were run on a 1024-node Linux Networx Evolocity II cluster at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC). The parallelized NTU/Purdue model's scalability characteristics were evaluated for a fixed grid size, with the number of processors ranging from 4 to 128; the model scales very well up to at least 128 processors on the ARL MSRC's Linux cluster.