Accelerating the FlowSimulator: Profiling and scalability analysis of an industrial-grade CFD-CSM toolchain

Abstract

Aeroelasticity simulations increase in importance for aircraft design, requiring an efficient coupling of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with computational structure mechanics (CSM) solvers. This contribution investigates the scalability of a high-fidelity CFD-CSM toolchain on modern high-performance computing (HPC) architectures. It consists of DLR's TAU solver for fluid dynamics simulations [1], and FlowSimulator [2] components for the incorporation of precomputed structural normal mode data, as well as for the underlying mesh deformations. The computational performance of the entire simulation pipeline is evaluated using a single measurement suite, allowing to identify bottlenecks of individual components and differences in their scalability. Preliminary improvements are realized via hybrid parallelization. Although this study focuses on a specific toolchain, key findings about scalability issues are relevant for complex CFD-CSM or other coupled simulations in general.