Parallel processing for large scale aerospace engineering simulations

Computational simulations in the field of aerospace engineering are characterized by the requirement to handle solution domains, which are frequently of complex geometrical shape. Numerical techniques are under development to enable the simulation of transient flows, turbulent flows, and electromagnetic scattering. This chapter reports on initial attempts at using parallel processing to enable the unstructured grid approach to be employed for the solution of some computationally demanding problems in these new application areas. The parallel implementation of an explicit unstructured mesh based approach for the solution of problems in aerospace engineering is described in the chapter. Practical examples illustrate the performance level that can be achieved in different problem areas. Explicit procedures for the solution of equation systems in conservation law form have been parallelized and applied to the simulation of a series of different problem areas, which are of interest in aerospace engineering. Yet, the approach is limited by the size of the mesh that can be employed. Continuous work on this is going on to get rid of this problem by applying parallel processing to the mesh generation and decomposition stages.