On the scalability of CFD tool for supersonic jet flow configurations

Abstract: New regulations are imposing noise emissions limitations for the aviation industry which are pushing researchers and engineers to invest efforts in studying the aeroacoustics phenomena. Following this trend, an in-house computational fluid dynamics tool is build to reproduce high fidelity results of supersonic jet flows for aeroacoustic analogy applications. The solver is written using the large eddy simulation formulation that is discretized using a finite difference approach and an explicit time integration. Numerical simulations of supersonic jet flows are very expensive and demand efficient high-performance computing. Therefore, non-blocking message passage interface protocols and parallel Input/Output features are implemented into the code in order to perform simulations which demand up to one billion grid points. The present work addresses the evaluation of code improvements along with the computational performance of the solver running on a computer with maximum theoretical peak of 2.727 PFlops. Different mesh configurations, whose size varies from a few hundred thousand to approximately one billion grid points, are evaluated in the present paper. Calculations are performed using different workloads in order to assess the strong and weak scalability of the parallel computational tool. Moreover, validation results of a realistic flow condition are also presented in the current work.