Parallel-vector solution of large-scale structural analysis problems on supercomputers
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The numerical simulation of the unsteady three-dimensional viscous flow in a gas turbine stage is considered. Results from a three-dimensional time-accurate Navier-Stokes simulation of rotor-stator interaction in an axial turbine stage are presented. The present study uses a fine grid in the spanwise direction to better resolve the complex three-dimensional flowfield, and complements earlier reported coarse-grid calculations. Several different features of the flowfield are analyzed and compared to earlier calculations and to experimental data whenever possible. Computer animation techniques are used to visualize various unsteady three-dimensional features of the flow. The results demonstrate the capabilities of current computing hardware in obtaining accurate simulations of unsteady flows in turbomachines.
A computational algorithmic procedure is developed and implemented for the dynamic analysis of a multibody system with rigid/flexible interconnected bodies. The algorithm takes into consideration the large rotation/translation and small elastic deformations associated with the rigid-body degrees of freedom and the flexibility of the bodies in the system respectively. Versatile three-dimensional isoparametric brick elements are employed for the modeling of the geometric configurations of the bodies. The formulation of the recursive dynamical equations of motion is based on the recursive Kane's equations, strain energy concepts, and the techniques of component mode synthesis. In order to minimize CPU-intensive matrix multiplication operations and speed up the execution process, the concepts of indexed arrays is utilized in the formulation of the equations of motion. A spin-up maneuver of a space robot with three flexible links carrying a solar panel is used as an illustrative example.
A Choleski method is described and used to solve linear systems of equations that arise in large scale structural analysis. The method uses a novel variable-band storage scheme and is structured to exploit fast local memory caches while minimizing data access delays between main memory and vector registers. Several parallel implementations of this method are described for the CRAY-2 and CRAY Y-MP computers demonstrating the use of microtasking and autotasking directives. A portable parallel language, FORCE, is used for comparison with the microtasked and autotasked implementations. Results are presented comparing the matrix factorization times for three representative structural analysis problems from runs made in both dedicated and multi-user modes on both computers. CPU and wall clock timings are given for the parallel implementations and are compared to single processor timings of the same algorithm.
A parallel Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (PCG) iterative solver has been developed and implemented on the iPSC-860 scalable hypercube. This new implementation makes use of the Parallel Automated Runtime Toolkit at ICASE (PARTI) primitives to efficiently program irregular communications patterns that exist in general sparse matrices and in particular in the finite element sparse stiffness matrices. The iterative PCG has been used to solve the finite element equations that result from discretizing large scale aerospace structures. In particular, the static response of the High Speed Civil Transport (HSCT) finite element model is solved on the iPSC-860.
A Choleski method used to solve linear systems of equations that arise in large scale structural analyses is described. The method uses a novel variable-band storage scheme and is structured to exploit fast local memory caches while minimizing data access delays between main memory and vector registers. Several parallel implementations of this method are described for the CRAY-2 and CRAY Y-MP computers demonstrating the use of microtasking and autotasking directives. A portable parallel language, FORCE, is also used for two different parallel implementations, demonstrating the use of CRAY macrotasking. Results are presented comparing the matrix factorization times for three representative structural analysis problems from runs made in both dedicated and multi-user modes on both the CRAY-2 and CRAY Y-MP computers. CPU and wall clock timings are given for the various parallel methods and are compared to single processor timings of the same algorithm. Computation rates over 1 GIGAFLOP (1 billion floating point operations per second) on a four processor CRAY-2 and over 2 GIGAFLOPS on an eight processor CRAY Y-MP are demonstrated as measured by wall clock time in a dedicated environment. Reduced wall clock times for the parallel methods relative to the single processor implementation of the same Choleski algorithm are also demonstrated for runs made in multi-user mode.
As the computing capacity of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) systems is increased and new applications are developed, the need for archival capacity will increase. The hardware and software architectures that will be needed to support advanced applications are discussed. Viewgraphs are included.
The identification of distorted radio-loud quasars provides a potentially very powerful tool for basic cosmological studies. If large morphological distortions are correlated with membership of the quasars in rich clusters of galaxies, optical observations can be used to identify rich clusters of galaxies at large redshifts. Hintzen, Ulvestad, and Owen (1983, HUO) undertook a VLA A array snapshot survey at 20 cm of 123 radio-loud quasars, and they found that among triple sources in their sample, 17 percent had radio axes which were bent more than 20 deg and 5 percent were bent more than 40 deg. Their subsequent optical observations showed that excess galaxy densities within 30 arcsec of 6 low-redshift distorted quasars were on average 3 times as great as those around undistorted quasars (Hintzen 1984). At least one of the distorted quasars observed, 3C275.1, apparently lies in the first-ranked galaxy at the center of a rich cluster of galaxies (Hintzen and Romanishin, 1986). Although their sample was small, these results indicated that observations of distorted quasars could be used to identify clusters of galaxies at large redshifts. The purpose of this project is to increase the available sample of distorted quasars to allow optical detection of a significant sample of quasar-associated clusters of galaxies at large redshifts.
An upwind-biased, point-implicit relaxation algorithm for obtaining the numerical solution to the governing equations for three-dimensional, viscous, hypersonic flows in chemical and thermal nonequilibrium is described. The algorithm is derived using a finite-volume formulation in which the inviscid components of flux across cell walls are described with Roe's averaging and Harten's entropy fix with second-order corrections based on Yee's Symmetric Total Variation Diminishing scheme. The relaxation strategy is well suited for computers employing either vector or parallel architectures, and the relation between computer architecture and algorithm is emphasized. It is also well suited to the numerical solution of the governing equations on unstructured grids. Because of the point-implicit relaxation strategy, the algorithm remains stable at large Courant numbers without the necessity of solving large. block tri-diagonal systems. A single relaxation step depends only on information from nearest neighbors. Predictions for pressure distributions, surface heating, and aerodynamic coefficients compare well with experimental data for Mach 10 flow over a blunt body. Predictions for the hypersonic flow of air in chemical and thermal nonequilibrium (velocity = 8917 m/s, altitude = 78 km.) over the Aeroassist Flight Experiment (AFE) configuration obtained on a multi-domain grid are discussed.
We have implemented a parallel computer architecture based entirely upon commodity personal computer components. Using 16 Intel Pentium Pro microprocessors and switched fast ethernet as a communication fabric, we have obtained sustained performance on scientific applications in excess of one Gigaflop. During one production astrophysics treecode simulation, we performed 1.2 x 10(sup 15) floating point operations (1.2 Petaflops) over a three week period, with one phase of that simulation running continuously for two weeks without interruption. We report on a variety of disk, memory and network benchmarks. We also present results from the NAS parallel benchmark suite, which indicate that this architecture is competitive with current commercial architectures. In addition, we describe some software written to support efficient message passing, as well as a Linux device driver interface to the Pentium hardware performance monitoring registers.
The relative roles of large-scale scientific computers and physical experiments in several science and engineering disciplines are discussed. Increasing dependence on computers is shown to be motivated both by the rapid growth in computer speed and memory, which permits accurate numerical simulation of complex physical phenomena, and by the rapid reduction in the cost of performing a calculation, which makes computation an increasingly, attractive complement to experimentation. Computer speed and memory requirements are presented for selected areas of such disciplines as fluid dynamics, aerodynamics, aerothermodynamics, chemistry, atmospheric sciences, astronomy, and astrophysics, together with some examples of the complementary nature of computation and experiment. Finally the impact of the emerging role of computers in the technical disciplines is discussed in terms of both the requirements for experimentation and the attainment of previously inaccessible information on physical processes.
A three-dimensional electrostatic particle-in-cell (PIC) plasma simulation code has been developed on coarse-grain distributed-memory massively parallel computers with message passing communications. Our implementation is the generalization to three-dimensions of the general concurrent particle-in-cell (GCPIC) algorithm. In the GCPIC algorithm, the particle computation is divided among the processors using a domain decomposition of the simulation domain. In a three-dimensional simulation, the domain can be partitioned into one-, two-, or three-dimensional subdomains ("slabs," "rods," or "cubes") and we investigate the efficiency of the parallel implementation of the push for all three choices. The present implementation runs on the Intel Touchstone Delta machine at Caltech; a multiple-instruction-multiple-data (MIMD) parallel computer with 512 nodes. We find that the parallel efficiency of the push is very high, with the ratio of communication to computation time in the range 0.3%-10.0%. The highest efficiency (> 99%) occurs for a large, scaled problem with 64(sup 3) particles per processing node (approximately 134 million particles of 512 nodes) which has a push time of about 250 ns per particle per time step. We have also developed expressions for the timing of the code which are a function of both code parameters (number of grid points, particles, etc.) and machine-dependent parameters (effective FLOP rate, and the effective interprocessor bandwidths for the communication of particles and grid points). These expressions can be used to estimate the performance of scaled problems--including those with inhomogeneous plasmas--to other parallel machines once the machine-dependent parameters are known.
The primary objective of this research is to support the design of liquid rocket systems for the Advanced Space Transportation System. Since the space launch systems in the near future are likely to rely on liquid rocket engines, increasing the efficiency and reliability of the engine components is an important task. One of the major problems in the liquid rocket engine is to understand fluid dynamics of fuel and oxidizer flows from the fuel tank to plume. Understanding the flow through the entire turbo-pump geometry through numerical simulation will be of significant value toward design. One of the milestones of this effort is to develop, apply and demonstrate the capability and accuracy of 3D CFD methods as efficient design analysis tools on high performance computer platforms. The development of the Message Passage Interface (MPI) and Multi Level Parallel (MLP) versions of the INS3D code is currently underway. The serial version of INS3D code is a multidimensional incompressible Navier-Stokes solver based on overset grid technology, INS3D-MPI is based on the explicit massage-passing interface across processors and is primarily suited for distributed memory systems. INS3D-MLP is based on multi-level parallel method and is suitable for distributed-shared memory systems. For the entire turbo-pump simulations, moving boundary capability and efficient time-accurate integration methods are built in the flow solver, To handle the geometric complexity and moving boundary problems, an overset grid scheme is incorporated with the solver so that new connectivity data will be obtained at each time step. The Chimera overlapped grid scheme allows subdomains move relative to each other, and provides a great flexibility when the boundary movement creates large displacements. Two numerical procedures, one based on artificial compressibility method and the other pressure projection method, are outlined for obtaining time-accurate solutions of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. The performance of the two methods is compared by obtaining unsteady solutions for the evolution of twin vortices behind a flat plate. Calculated results are compared with experimental and other numerical results. For an unsteady flow, which requires small physical time step, the pressure projection method was found to be computationally efficient since it does not require any subiteration procedure. It was observed that the artificial compressibility method requires a fast convergence scheme at each physical time step in order to satisfy the incompressibility condition. This was obtained by using a GMRES-ILU(0) solver in present computations. When a line-relaxation scheme was used, the time accuracy was degraded and time-accurate computations became very expensive.
Contents of the papers include: Visualization techniques- The next generation, Small-machine visualizing very big data sets, Public display of Lunar Prospector data, Steering molecules via Feel, High-dimensional data browser, Multi-source visualization, Interactive surface flow visualization, and the Virtual Windtunnel.
The Stereo Visualization Theater is a high-resolution graphics demonstration that prides a review of current research being performed at NASA. Using a stereoscopic projection, multiple participants can explore scientific data in new ways. The pre-processed audio and video are being played in real-time off of a workstation. A stereo graphics filter for the projector and passive polarized glasses worn by audience members are used to create the stereo effect.
In this paper, the REE radiation fault model and accompanying tool set are presented. Explained is its derivation, its structure and use, and the work being done to validate it.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.