High performance simulations of compressible flows inside car engine geometries using the N3S-NATUR parallel solver

This paper is concerned with the application of the N3S-NATUR parallel CFD software to industrial flow problems taken from the automotive industry. N3 S-NATUR is a finite element software that solves the 3D compressible Navier -Stokes equations coupled to a two-equation turbulence model, around or ins ide complex geometries. N3S-NATUR is capable of handling calculations on de forming meshes and is therefore particularly well suited to the simulation of unsteady flows inside piston engine geometries, The parallelization of N 3S-NATUR relies on a strategy that combines domain partitioning techniques and a message passing programming model. Results are presented and discusse d for steady and unsteady flow calculations performed on an SGl Origin 2000 MIMD system, a Pentium Pro cluster and a DEC Alpha cluster; for both clust ers, the interconnection is realized through a FastEthernet (100 Mbit/s) sw itch. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.