HPC Requirements of High-Fidelity Flow Simulations for Aerodynamic Applications

Abstract

This paper relates the computational demand of turbulence-resolving flow simulations for aircraft aerodynamics to the parallel scalability of the DLR flow solvers TAU and THETA, as well as the new CODA solver optimized for many-core HPC systems. Based on existing lower-fidelity simulations, the computational requirements for wall-resolved LES are first estimated for single aircraft components at wind-tunnel scale. It is shown that such simulations at reduced Reynolds numbers would be realizable within days to weeks with the current methods, if the largest available HPC clusters with more than 100,000 cores were used. However, an extrapolation to the HPC requirements of LES for a full 3D wing of an aircraft at flight Reynolds numbers highlights the urgent need for larger HPC resources and adapted parallel code designs, as well as more efficient numerical algorithms and physical models.