Parallel Simulation of an Unsteady Forced Convection around a Linear Cascade Using PC-Cluster

A multi-core PC cluster based on linux operating system was designed and built with an affordable PC hardware and high speed Gigabyte network switches. The PC cluster consisted of 36-cores and easily expandable. With a commercial CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) package, the performance of the HPC was evaluated by changing the number of CPU involved in the computation. An unsteady forced convection problem around a linear cascade was solved using the CFX program and the heat transfer coefficient along the surface of the cascade was investigated. The mesh of the model CFD problem has 1.5 million nodes and the unsteady computation was performed during 2000 time-integrations. The performance of present HPC cluster increases as the number of code increases up to 16 cores. It was shown that the computation time with 16-core is approximately 3times faster than that with 4-core.