As expected for a problem of this size, the RD algorithm does not scale well to 512 nodes due to communication bandwidth limitations. Nonetheless, these initial tests have shown that the RD method can be efficiently used for production work on a partition of the Delta. We believe that this work, as well as that of other Consortium members, underscores issues important to the design and development of future high performance computers. This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under contract with Battelle Memorial Institute which operates the Pacific Northwest Laboratory and PNL's Laboratory Discretionary Research and Development Program. A particular challenge arises from the need to compute accurately the aerodynamic effects of a geometrically complex object such as a full aircraft with flaps and engines.
Unstructured meshes provide a great deal of flexibility in discretizing complex domains.
Our work has demonstrated that we can efficiently calculate inviscid steady-state flows over aircraft using unstructured mesh methods. 3-D unstructured Euler solver have both been developed and implemented. Figure Coming Soon Figure 2. The flow variables are stored at the vertices of the mesh, and piecewise linear flux functions are assumed over the individual tetrahedra of the mesh. The resulting spatially discretized equations may be assembled as a loop over all edges of the mesh, followed by a loop over the triangular boundary faces of the mesh.