Impact of Parallel Computing on High Fidelity Based Multidisciplinary Analysis

An efficient super modular process to simulate aeroelasticity of aerospace vehicles using high fidelity flow equations such as the Euler/Navier-Stokes equations is presented. The process is suitable for both tightly coupled and uncoupled analysis. The process is designed to execute on massively parallel processors (MPP) and work-station clusters based on a multiple-instruction, multiple-data (MIMD) architecture. The fluids discipline is parallelized using a zonal approach whereas the structures discipline is parallelized using the sub-structures concept. Provision is also made to include controls domain. Computations of each discipline are spread across processors using IEEE standard message passing interface (MPI) for inter processor communications. Disciplines can run in parallel using a macro utility MPIRUN developed based on MPI. In addition to discipline parallelization and coarse-grain parallelization of the disciplines, embarrassingly parallel capability to run multiple parameter cases is implemented using a script system. The combined effect of three levels of parallelization is an almost linear scalability for multiple concurrent analyses that perform efficiently on MPP.