Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Mavriplis, Catherine.
We present a complete specification of a new benchmark for measuring the performance of modern computer systems when solving scientific problems featuring irregular, dynamic memory accesses. It complements the existing NAS Parallel Benchmark suite. The benchmark involves the solution of a stylized heat transfer problem in a cubic domain, discretized on an adaptively refined, unstructured mesh.
High order methods are frequently used in computational simulation for their high accuracy. An efficient way to avoid unnecessary computation in smooth regions of the solution is to use adaptive meshes which employ fine grids only in areas where they are needed. Nonconforming spectral elements allow the grid to be flexibly adjusted to satisfy the computational accuracy requirements. The method is suitable for computational simulations of unsteady problems with very disparate length scales or unsteady moving features, such as heat transfer, fluid dynamics or flame combustion. In this work, we select the Mark Element Method (MEM) to handle the non-conforming interfaces between elements. A new technique is introduced to efficiently implement MEM in 3-D nonconforming meshes. By introducing an "intermediate mortar", the proposed method decomposes the projection between 3-D elements and mortars into two steps. In each step, projection matrices derived in 2-D are used. The two-step method avoids explicitly forming/deriving large projection matrices for 3-D meshes, and also helps to simplify the implementation. This new technique can be used for both h- and p-type adaptation. This method is applied to an unsteady 3-D moving heat source problem. With our new MEM implementation, mesh adaptation is able to efficiently refine the grid near the heat source and coarsen the grid once the heat source passes. The savings in computational work resulting from the dynamic mesh adaptation is demonstrated by the reduction of the the number of elements used and CPU time spent. MEM and mesh adaptation, respectively, bring irregularity and dynamics to the computer memory access pattern. Hence, they provide a good way to gauge the performance of computer systems when running scientific applications whose memory access patterns are irregular and unpredictable. We select a 3-D moving heat source problem as the Unstructured Adaptive (UA) grid benchmark, a new component of the NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB). In this paper, we present some interesting performance results of ow OpenMP parallel implementation on different architectures such as the SGI Origin2000, SGI Altix, and Cray MTA-2.
Results are presented for the numerical simulation of unsteady viscous incompressible flow past thick airfoils. Specifically, flow past a NACA 4424 at an angle of attack of 2.5 deg and Reynolds numbers in the range of 1700-4000 has been simulated using the spectral element method. At these conditions the flow is separatedd and an unsteady wake is formed. Application of the method of empirical eigenfunction reveals the structure of the most energetic components of the flow. These are found to occur in pairs that, through phase exchange, are responsible for the vortex shedding. A set of ordinary differential equations is obtained for the amplitudes of these eigenfunctions by a Galerkin projection of the Navier-Stokes equations. The solutions of the model system are compared with the full simulation. The work is of relevance to the transition process and observed routes to chaos in airfoil wakes.
We discuss the use of triangular elements in the spectral element method for direct simulation of incompressible flow. Triangles provide much greater geometric flexibility and are better conditioned and more accurate than quadrilateral elements when small angles arise. We employ a family of tensor product algorithms for triangles, allowing triangular elements to be handled with comparable arithmetic complexity to quadrilateral elements. The triangular discretizations are applied to the Poisson equation and are validated. The triangular discretizations are then applied to the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, and a laminar channel flow solution is given. The new triangular spectral elements can be combined with standard quadrilateral elements, yielding a general and flexible high order method for complex geometries in two dimensions.
An adaptive spectral method was developed for the efficient solution of time dependent partial differential equations. Adaptive mesh strategies that include resolution refinement and coarsening by three different methods are illustrated on solutions to the 1-D viscous Burger equation and the 2-D Navier-Stokes equations for driven flow in a cavity. Sharp gradients, singularities, and regions of poor resolution are resolved optimally as they develop in time using error estimators which indicate the choice of refinement to be used. The adaptive formulation presents significant increases in efficiency, flexibility, and general capabilities for high order spectral methods.