Large Scale Aerodynamic Calculation on Pleiades

Abstract

A very large scale aerodynamic calculation on the NASA Pleiades supercomputer using the three-dimensional Navier-Stokes code OVERFLOW is presented. The application is a rotorcraft blade simulation, with attention focused on the resolution of the vortices which develop off the blade tips and propagate through the flow domain. This simulation represents a level of refinement beyond any previous results presented for this problem. This extremely large CFD application stresses the capabilities of the Pleiades system, uses a relevant application with high levels of grid resolution to provide benchmark results, and helps to assess the capabilities of the OVERFLOW code in terms of scalability, parallel efficiency and performance.