Towards fully parallel aerospace simulations on unstructured meshes

A general philosophy is presented in which all the modules within the computational cycle are parallelised and executed on parallel computer hardware, thereby avoiding the creation of computational bottlenecks. In particular, unstructured mesh generation with adaptation, computational fluid dynamics and computational electromagnetic solvers and the visualisation of grid and solution data are all performed in parallel. In addition, all these modules are embedded within a parallel problem solving environment. This paper will provide an overview of these developments. In particular, details of the parallel mesh generator, which has been used to generate meshes in excess of 100 million elements, will be given. A brief overview will be presented of the approach used to parallelise the solvers and how large data sets are interrogated and visualised on distributed computer platforms. Details of the parallel adaptation algorithm will be presented. These parallel component modules are linked using CORBA communication to provide an integrated parallel approach for large scale simulations. Several examples are given of the approach applied to the simulation of large aerospace calculations in the field of aerodynamics and electromagnetics.