Large Eddy Simulation of Combustion on Massively Parallel Machines

Combustion is the source of eighty percent of the energy produced in the world: it is therefore a topic of major interest in the present context of global warming and decreasing fuel resources. Simulating combustors and especially instability mechanisms in these systems has become a central issue in the combustion community in the last ten years. This can be achieved only on massively parallel computers. This paper presents modern techniques to simulate reacting flows in realistic geometries and shows how parallel computing (typically thousands of processors) has made these simulations possible. The physics of reacting flows are only discussed briefly to concentrate on specific issues linked to massively parallel computing, to the turbulent character of the flow and the effects of rounding errors.