AERODYNAMICSANALYSISACCELERATIONTHROUGH RECONFIGURABLE HARDWARE

Thelongcomputation times required tosimulate completeaircraft configurations remain asthemainbottleneck in thedesign flowofnewstructures fortheaeronautics industry.Inthis paper, thenovel application ofspecific hardwareinconjunction withconventional processors toaccelerateComputational Fluid Dynamics isexplored. First, some general facts about application-specific hardware arepresented, placing thefocus onthefeasibility ofthedevelopmentofhardware modules (FPGAsbased) fortheacceleration ofmosttime-consuming algorithms inaeronautics analysis. So,apractical methodology fordeveloping anFPGAbased computing solution forthequasi IDEuler equations isapplied totheSod's "Shock Tube"problem. Results comparing CPU-based andFPGA-based solutions arepresented, showing that speedups around twoorders ofmagnitude can beexpected fromtheFPGA-based implementation.