Parallelization of the Euler Equations on Unstructured Grids

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 Jacobi, 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 Albada limiter has performance similar to Venkatakrishnan’s.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph. D.

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Aerospace and Ocean Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Aerospace and Ocean Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

1996

Author dc:creator

• Bruner, Christopher William Stuteville

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Walters, Robert W.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Hoeg, Joseph G.
• Devenport, William J.
• Schetz, Joseph A.
• Grossman, Bernard M.

• unstructured grids
• parallel algorithms
• computational fluid dynamics

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

etd-314610359611541

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/30397