Performance Analysis and Optimization of CFD Applications

Abstract

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations are a valuable tool in research and engineering. The increasing demand for compute performance and scalability of high-fidelity CFD simulations requires continuous performance analysis and optimization as part of the CFD software development cycle. For this task, performance tools provide significant support for software developers to investigate and understand the application behavior. This work evaluates the performance of different CFD codes and provides an overview of aspects that are crucial for highly scalable High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. This work applies performance modelling to a code for the computation of the three-dimensional unsteady flow in multi-stage compressors and turbine components to estimate its scalability. In addition, this work presents scalability studies of a next-generation CFD software for aerodynamic simulations of fully equipped aircraft, demonstrating that mesh partitioning is a performance critical part of CFD simulations. Finally, this work compares the results of weak and strong scaling experiments on different compute architectures and emphasises the benefits of offloading computationally intensive code sections to GPUs.