FlowSimulator: A Python-controlled Approach to Unify Future CFD Simulation Workflows

Kurzfassung

Over the last years, multidisciplinary simulations got more and more important. Especially, in the field of aerospace science and engineering, the aim is to "fly the virtual aircraft", i.e. to gather as much information about future aircrafts as possible before even a wind tunnel model is built. This includes aerodynamics and aero elastics as well as economic data (e.g. the range of new aircrafts). The underlying simulations incorporate tools from different vendors and research facilities which have to be coupled. Right now, this is often done by simple shell scripts, user interaction and a lot of disk I/O and copying across the network which slows down the complete process. To overcome this, the FlowSimulator framework has been developed by Airbus, DLR, EADS, and others as a new backbone for scientific computations in the field for aerodynamics and associated topics. It consists of the FlowSimulator Data Manager (FSDM) which is a library providing fully-parallelized data structures for numeric simulations. This library can be extended using a (pseudo-)plug-in mechanism and is largely interfaced to Python. On top of this, there is the FlowSimulator Control layer. This is a pure Python library helping the user to define his workflows in an easy way. With this library, the whole scientific and industrial simulation process can then be controlled and monitored by a Python script.