The design and implementation of a parallel unstructured Euler solver using software primitives

This paper is concerned with the implementation of a three-dimensional unstructuredgrid Euler-solver on massively parallel distributed-memory computer architectures. The goal is to minimize solution time by achieving high computational rates with a numerically efficient algorithm. An unstructured multigrid algorithm with an edge-based data-structure has been adopted, and a number of optimizations have been devised and implemented in order to accelerate the parallel computational rates. The implementation is carried out by creating a set of software tools, which provide an interface between the parallelization issues and the sequential code, while providing a basis for future automatic run-time compilation support. Large practical unstructured grid problems are solved on the Intel iPSC/860 hypercube and Intel Touchstone Delta machine. The quantitative effect of the various optimizations are demonstrated, and we show that the combined effect of these optimizations leads to roughly a factor of three performance improvement. The overall solution efficiency is compared with that obtained on the CRAY-YMP vector supercomputer. XResearch was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under NASA Contract No. NAS1-18605 while the authors were in residence at the Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (ICASE), NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA 23665.