The main thrust of the present research is directed to the development of a highly parallel distributed simulation capability for analyzing 3-D transient and steady state coupled viscous flow and transport processes in this class. This implies an emphasis on parallel algorithm research and methodology for efficient scalable high performance simulations that can be applied to microgravity problems of fundamental interest. We emphasize that the simulator will also be applicable to other coupled flow and transport problems of interest to NASA, U.S. manufacturing, and Science and Engineering. Part of the research work also concerns supporting experimental studies on thermocapillary effects in thin films. We develop a system of governing partial differential equations for coupled viscous incompressible flow and heat transfer that include both buoyancy and thermocapillary surface tension effects.
Parallelism is achieved using a domain decomposition of the flow domain and mesh.
The resulting discretized problem leads to a sequence of sparse algebraic systems that are solved using a parallel form of generalized conjugate gradient solver. Special attention has been paid to parallel performance aspects to meet the performance milestones specified in the contract. This implies that such issues as efficient parallel communication and overlapping communication and computation are addressed as well as use of BLAS for computational kernels. The experimental work has been directed to fundamental studies of free surface phenomena for thin films and is being carried out in the Experimental Flows Lab of the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics. 50 GigaFlops sustained performance using on vendor testbed.