Development of a novel Navier-Stokes solver (HiPSTAR)

Started: 1st September 2007
Ending: 31st August 2012
Investigators: Richard Sandberg

The High-Performance Solver for Turbulence and Aeroacoustic Research (HiPSTAR) is currently being developed as part of the Royal Academy of Engineering/EPSRC research fellowship. The code is tailored to be particularly efficient for axisymmetric flows by employing generalized cylindrical coordinates and making a significant effort to minimize the memory requirement of the code in light of severe bandwidth limitations imposed by current multi core architectures. The code includes the following features: i) highly (wavenumber resolution) optimized 4th-order accurate compact differences, ii) a spectral method for the azimuthal direction (enabling a state-of-the-art axis treatment that exploits parity conditions of individual Fourier modes), iii) ultra low-storage 4th-order Runge-Kutta time integration, iv) skew-symmetric splitting of the nonlinear terms, v) non-reflective characteristic boundary conditions, and vi) domain decomposition in the streamwise and radial directions using an MPI parallelization. The parallel efficiency of HiPSTAR has been extensively tested on various computing platforms and excellent performance was achieved on HECToR for up to 14,208 cores. In a current CRAY centre of excellence project, the code is being converted to a hybrid OMP/MPI parallelisation. HiPSTAR is now also used by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).

Computational Modelling Group

Development of a novel Navier-Stokes solver (HiPSTAR)

Categories