Experience in using SIMD and MIMD parallelism for computational fluid dynamics

Abstract

One of the key objectives of the Applied Research Branch in the Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation (NAS) Systems Division at NASA Ames Research Center is the accelerated introduction of highly parallel machines into a fully operational environment. In this report we summarize some of the experiences with the parallel testbed machines at the NAS Applied Research Branch. We discuss the performance results obtained from the implementation of two computational fluid dynamics (CFD) applications, an unstructured grid solver and a particle simulation, on the Connection Machine CM-2 and the Intel iPSC/860.