A case study in parallel computation: Viscous flow around an ONERA M6 wing

We examine the solution of a practical engineering problem on a parallel computer. The problem involves the steady laminar viscous flow about an ONERA M6 wing and the computer is a 64-processing-node Connection Machine CM-5E. We show that efficient domain decomposition procedures lead to a balanced load on the processors and low communication times. The net result is that solutions can be attained in roughly 20 min elapsed time for a 48,011-node, 266,566-element unstructured mesh. We conclude that this is sufficiently fast to support the design process.