Implementation and Results of a Novel Computational Fluid Dynamics Optimization Methodology

Using a novel optimization methodology, we demonstrate the necessity of testing to determine the optimum hardware configuration for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). We present our optimization results for three disparate CFD models. One model included three meshes ranging from 3e5 to 2e7 cells, the second had meshes of 6e6 and 5e7 cells, and the third model's mesh was 1e8 cells. We show that hardware scaling behavior cannot be predicted by specifications and that results from one model or mesh cannot be applied to another. While it is unfortunate testing results cannot be extrapolated, the optimization process is worthwhile: we achieved performance improvements of over 10% compared to what might be selected with an unoptimized approach.