Parallelization of the Euler Equations on Unstructured Grids

Aerospace Engineering (ABSTRACT) Several different time-integration algorithms for the Euler equations are investigated on two distributed-memory parallel computers using an explicit message-passing paradigm: these are classic Euler Explicit, four-stage Jameson-style Runge-Kutta, Block Jaco-bi, Block Gauss-Seidel, and Block Symmetric Gauss-Seidel. A finite-volume formulation is used for the spatial discretization of the physical domain. Both two-and three-dimensional test cases are evaluated against five reference solutions to demonstrate accuracy of the fundamental sequential algorithms. Different schemes for communicating or approximating data that are not available on the local compute node are discussed and it is shown that complete sharing of the evolving solution to the inner matrix problem at every iteration is faster than the other schemes considered. Speedup and efficiency issues pertaining to the various time-integration algorithms are then addressed for each system. Of the algorithms considered, Symmetric Block Gauss-Seidel has the overall best performance. It is also demonstrated that using parallel efficiency as the sole means of evaluating performance of an algorithm often leads to erroneous conclusions; the clock time needed to solve a problem is a much better indicator of algorithm performance. A general method for extending one-dimensional limiter formulations to the unstructured case is also discussed and applied to Van Albada's limiter as well as Roe's Superbee limiter. Solutions and convergence histories for a two-dimensional supersonic ramp problem using these limiters are presented along with computations using the limiters of Barth & Jesperson and Venkatakrishnan — the Van Al-bada limiter has performance similar to Venkatakrishnan's. iii Dedication to my wife and children: Susan, Kristin, Justin, and Erin iv Acknowledgments I would like first to acknowledge the boundless patience and loving support of my wife Susan. Without her unending encouragement and prayers through all my academic pursuits, I could never have completed this work. I am deeply indebted to my academic advisor, Dr. Robert Walters. A very small amount of his enormous expertise and insight has (I hope) rubbed off on me, and it has been a pleasure to work under his tutelage. I would also like to thank the United States Navy, the Office of Naval Research, and the Naval Air Warfare Center for providing financial support for this work through the Long-term Training and In-house Laboratory Independent Research programs. Finally, I am tremendously grateful to Dr. Asha Varma of the Naval Air Warfare Center for believing in me and being my advocate when it seemed no one else …