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High Resolution Aerospace Applications Using the NASA Columbia Supercomputer

Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Wyoming, Laramie WY 82071, USA

Michael J. Aftosmis

NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA 94035, USA

Marsha Berger

Department of Computer Science, Courant Institute, NYU, 251 Mercer St. NY, NY 10012, USA, berger{at}cims.nyu.edu

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-fidelity 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 InfiniBand 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 InfiniBand 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.

Key Words: NASA Columbia • SGI Altix • scalability • hybrid programming • unstructured • computational fluid dynamics • OpenMP

International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, Vol. 21, No. 1, 106-126 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1094342006074872


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