Parallel discontinuous Galerkin finite element method for computing hyperbolic conservation law on unstructured meshes

Purpose The discontinuous Galerkin finite element method (DGFEM) is very suited for realizing high order resolution approximations on unstructured grids for calculating the hyperbolic conservation law. However, it requires a significant amount of computing resources. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate how to solve the Euler equations in parallel systems and improve the parallel performance. Design/methodology/approach Discontinuous Galerkin discretization is used for the compressible inviscid Euler equations. The multi-level domain decomposition strategy was used to deal with the computational grids and ensure the calculation load balancing. The total variation diminishing (TVD) Runge-Kutta (RK) scheme coupled with the multigrid strategy was employed to further improve parallel efficiency. Moreover, the Newton Block Gauss-Seidel (GS) method was adopted to accelerate convergence and improve the iteration efficiency. Findings Numerical experiments were implemented for the compressible inviscid flow problems around NACA0012 airfoil, over M6 wing and DLR-F6 configuration. The parallel acceleration is near to a linear convergence. The results indicate that the present parallel algorithm can reduce computational time significantly and allocate memory reasonably, which has high parallel efficiency and speedup, and it is well-suited to large-scale scientific computational problems on multiple instruction stream multiple data stream model. Originality/value The parallel DGFEM coupled with TVD RK and the Newton Block GS methods was presented for hyperbolic conservation law on unstructured meshes.