High resolution aerospace applications using the NASA Columbia supercomputer

Dimitri J. Mavriplis, Michael J. Aftosmis, Marsha Berger

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

This paper focuses on the parallel performance of two high-performance aerodynamic simulation packages on the newly installed NASA Columbia supercomputer. These packages include both a high-fidelity, unstructured, Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes solver, and a fully-automated inviscid flow package for cut-cell Cartesian grids. The complementary combination of these two simulation codes enables high-fldelity characterization of aerospace vehicle design performance over the entire flight envelope through extensive parametric analysis and detailed simulation of critical regions of the flight envelope. Both packages are industrial-level codes designed for complex geometry and incorporate customized multigrid solution algorithms. The performance of these codes on Columbia is examined using both MPI and OpenMP and using both the NUMAlink and InflniBand interconnect fabrics. Numerical results demonstrate good scalability on up to 2016 cpus using the NUMAlink4 interconnect, with measured computational rates in the vicinity of 3 TFLOP/s, while InflniBand showed some performance degradation at high CPU counts, particularly with multigrid. Nonetheless, the results are encouraging enough to indicate that larger test cases using combined MPI/OpenMP communication should scale well on even more processors.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - Thirteenth International Symposium on Temporal Representation and Reasoning, TIME 2006
DOIs
StatePublished - 2005
EventACM/IEEE 2005 Supercomputing Conference, SC'05 - Seatle, WA, United States
Duration: Nov 12 2005Nov 18 2005

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM/IEEE 2005 Supercomputing Conference, SC'05
Volume2005

Other

OtherACM/IEEE 2005 Supercomputing Conference, SC'05
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySeatle, WA
Period11/12/0511/18/05

Keywords

  • Computational fluid dynamics
  • Hybrid programming
  • NASA Columbia
  • OpenMP
  • SGI Altix
  • Scalability
  • Unstructured

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Engineering

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