DEVELOPMENT OF A PARALLEL COMPUTATIONAL FLUID-DYNAMICS ALGORITHM ON A HYPERCUBE COMPUTER

One of the main factors limiting the widespread use of computational fluid dynamics codes for engineering design is their very large requirements both in terms of computer memory and CPU time. Distributed memory parallel computers offer both the potential for a dramatic improvement in cost/performance over conventional supercomputers and the scalability to large numbers of processors that is required if performance beyond that of current supercomputers is to be achieved. As part of an evaluation to explore the potential of such machines for computational fluid mechanics applications, a concurrent algorithm for the solution of the Navier-Stokes equations has been developed and demonstrated on a hypercube parallel computer. The algorithm is based on a domain decomposition of a well-established serial pressure correction algorithm. The algorithm is demonstrated on both a 32-node scalar and eight-node vector Intel iPSC/2 for complicated two-dimensional laminar and turbulent flow problems with different grid sizes and numbers of processors. Speed-ups relative to a single processor of 12.9 with 16 processors and 20.2 with 32 processors are achieved on a scalar iPSC/2, demonstrating the parallel efficiency of the algorithm. Measured performance on a 32-node scalar iPSC/2 exceeds one-sixth that of a Cray X-MP running the original serial algorithm. The performance of the algorithm on an eight-node vector iPSC/2 exceeds that of the larger scalar hypercube and is about one-fifth that of the Cray X-MP. With cost/performance more than 10 times better than the Cray, these results dramatically show the cost effectiveness of vector hypercubes for this class of fluid mechanics algorithm.