Chapter High-Performance Computing: Dos and Don'ts

• Main Author: Henrik Göbbert, Jens (auth)
• Other Authors: Houzeaux, Guillaume (auth), Borrell, R. (auth), Mehta, Vishal (auth), Fournier, Yvan (auth), Hachem, Elie (auth), Vázquez, Mariano (auth), Garcia-Gasulla, Marta (auth), Owen, Herbert (auth)
• Format: Electronic Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: InTechOpen 2018
• Subjects: Computer modelling & simulation; parallelization, high-performance computing, assembly, supercomputing, meshing, adaptivity, algebraic solvers, parallel I/O, visualization
• Online Access: OAPEN Library: download the publication; OAPEN Library: description of the publication

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is the main field of computational mechanics that has historically benefited from advances in high-performance computing. High-performance computing involves several techniques to make a simulation efficient and fast, such as distributed memory parallelism, shared memory parallelism, vectorization, memory access optimizations, etc. As an introduction, we present the anatomy of supercomputers, with special emphasis on HPC aspects relevant to CFD. Then, we develop some of the HPC concepts and numerical techniques applied to the complete CFD simulation framework: from preprocess (meshing) to postprocess (visualization) through the simulation itself (assembly and iterative solvers).