E-CFD-GPU

Efficient CFD Multi-physics programming research

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 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

'The current evolution in the aeronautical field towards high-fidelity simulations, including multi-physics and more reliable modeling of turbulence and transition, calls for a new approach of the complete CFD-multi-physics simulation chain, with a drastic reduction of its turnaround time. This requires revising the whole CAE chain, from pre-processing (CAD handling and mesh generation), to very fast basic CFD algorithms and to efficient, full parallel post-processing, in order to achieve a reduction of the global turn-around time by several orders of magnitude. On a shorter term, of 24 months of the current CfP project, the following objectives can be ensured, based on very recent developments performed at NUMECA Int.: • A gain of one order of magnitude at the pre-processing level, covering automatic CAD cleaning, wrapping and parallel unstructured grid generation for arbitrary complex configurations with the software system HEXPRESS™/Hybrid. • A gain of one order of magnitude, due to a novel convergence acceleration algorithm, allowing calculations with CFL=1000 and convergence of steady state RANS simulations, in 50 multigrid cycles. The present proposal has as objective to respond to the CfP topic by • extending these capabilities to the GRA-LNC configurations • extending the convergence acceleration methodology to simulations with laminar-turbulent transition, and to unsteady flows • providing guidelines for a next generation software environment for industrial aerodynamics simulation, in response to task 2 of the CfP, • porting of the CFD code and the convergence acceleration algorithms to GPU’s, with an expected additional gain of 1 to 2 orders of magnitude. One could therefore expect, combining the above mentioned efforts that within the framework of the project duration, a gain of 3-to 4 orders of magnitude will be achieved, in global CPU performance and turn-around time, for steady state RANS simulations in a first step.'

Introduzione (Teaser)

Over the last decades, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has become widely accepted as the main method for evaluating the aerodynamic performance of new designs. EU-funded researchers have proposed a new approach to drastically reduce the turnaround time of such high-fidelity simulations.

Descrizione progetto (Article)

CFD tools are increasingly used in the early phases of design because of their reliability and higher flexibility. Tremendous progress in the physical modelling of airflow, numerical algorithms and computer power is exploited for the design of aircraft and cars. But this is not the end of the story.

CFD simulations are computationally intensive. The simulation of a car or an aircraft in landing configuration requires geometry defined by thousands of surfaces, discretised with hundred millions of elements. Comparing various alternatives for enabling faster research using CFD was the aim of the EU-funded project E-CFD-GPU (Efficient CFD multi-physics programming research).

Tools such as HexpressTM/Hybrid designed for meshing complex geometries, the CPU Booster convergence acceleration module and its extension allowed impressive improvements in different stages of the computation chain. For instance, acceleration with the CPU Booster TM module can provide up to five times gain in convergence speed.

General-purpose graphics processing unit (GPU) technology was also explored to accelerate computationally intensive calculations. The capability of GPUs to simulate the flow behaviour of complex fluids was demonstrated by the pioneering work of the E-CFD-GPU team.

Finally, significant efforts were devoted to simplifying the simulation environment. Among the project outcomes were efficient algorithms developed for a multi-user, multi-physics simulation platform that takes advantage of modern hardware architectures. The E-CFD-GPU team are confident that these enhancements in CFD software will have a major impact on European competitiveness.