Application of NASA general-purpose solver to large-scale computations in aeroacoustics

Of several iterative and direct equation solvers evaluated previously for c omputations in aeroacoustics, the most promising was the NASA-developed gen eral-purpose solver (winner of NASA's 1999 software of the year award). Thi s paper presents detailed, single-processor statistics of the performance o f this solver, which has been tailored and optimized for large-scale aeroac oustic computations. The statistics compiled using an SGI ORIGIN 2000 compu ter with 12 Gb available memory (RAM) and eight available processors, are t he central processing unit time, RAM requirements, and solution error. The equation solver is capable of solving 10 thousand complex unknowns in as li ttle as 0.01 s using 0.02 Gb RAM, and 8.4 million complex unknowns in sligh tly less than 3 h using all 12 Gb. This latter solution Is the largest aero acoustics problem solved to date with this technique. The study was unable to detect any noticeable error in the solution, since noise levels predicte d from these solution vectors are in excellent agreement with the noise lev els computed from the exact solution. The equation solver provides a means for obtaining numerical solutions to aeroacoustics problems in three dimens ions. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.