High performance parallel computing for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)

The supersonic aerodynamic coefficient of a sphere that represents a broken piece of structure under explosion was obtained by using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD).The computer that was used in this study was self-made cluster type parallel machine and available maximum number of CPU was 128. The CFD software named CFD++ was used in this study. CFD++ is general purpose CFD software to solve three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations that represent characteristic of fluid viscosity and compressibility by using finite volume method. Using the parallel computer, computational time was reduced dramatically. The importance of network performance was mentioned in this study. Since Ethernet required more time for communication between CPUs, that performance was limited under the condition of small number of CPUs. However, using high-speed network system (Myrinet), we could get more performance even large number of CPUs. The use of 64bit CPUs was also effective to reduce computational time, in addition to provide advantage for building a large-scale computational model through an expansion of memory space.