FLOWer and CLIC-3D, A Portable Flow Solving System for Block Structured 3D-Applications; Status and Benchmarks

Abstract

FLOWer is a block structured, cell vertex, finite volume Euler/Navier-Stokes flow solver for the transonic regime. Its development started in the German national project POPINDA (July 1993 - November 1996, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education, Science and Technology). The FLOWer code was developed from a version of the DLR code, CEVCATS, supplemented by contributions of Daimler Benz's industrial aerospace codes as a portable, parallel code for industrial use. The parallelization of the FLOWer code for message passing architectures was realised by use of the high level communication library CLIC-3D. This library was also developed in the POPINDA project by the institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI) of the German National Research Centre for Information Technology (GMD) and will be further developed by SCAI in cooperation with NEC Europe. This paper gives a description and results of the current status of the FLOWer- and CLIC-3D code and of the self-adaptive parallel local refinement procedure that was implemented in FLOWer for CLIC-3D. The FLOWer code has become the standard aerodynamic DLR production code for external flows. After thorough validations, DASA's Deutsche Airbus Industries adopted this code, at least in coexistence with their code MELINA, as a production code in the aerodynamic department. In the military aircraft division of DASA, FLOWer has become an alternative next to other production codes.