Viscous flow computations for complex geometries on parallel computers

• Published in: Advances in engineering software (1992) Vol. 29; no. 3; pp. 337 - 343
• Main Authors: Vatsa, Veer N., Hammond, Dana P.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 01.04.1998
• ISSN: 0965-9978
• DOI: 10.1016/S0965-9978(97)00076-8

A widely used computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code known as TLNS3D, which was developed for large, shared-memory computers, is ported to a distributed computing environment. An engineering approach is used here to parallelize this code so that minimal deviation from the original (non-parallel) code is incurred. A natural partitioning along grid blocks is adopted in which one or more blocks are distributed to each of the available processors. An automatic, static load-balancing strategy is employed for equitable distribution of computational work to specified processors. The message passing interface (MPI) protocols are incorporated for data communication. Both synchronous and asynchronous communication modes have been incorporated. As the number of processors is increased, the asynchronous communication mode shows much better scalability and clearly outperforms the synchronous mode of communication.