Distributed parallel strategies for industrial CFD solvers: a case study and analysis of performances

The complexity of characterizing both parallel hardware and software makes it very difficult to explain and predict the performances of parallel programs for real industrial CFD applications. A performance model based on a generalized Amdahl's formulation has been developed and, applied to a flow solver. The present formulation allows us to explain the behavior of a typical CFD explicit multiblock solver when the program is run on a multiprocessor distributed-memory system. Using this approach, it is possible to gain an insight on the performance limitations of this class of parallel solvers, by considering the impact of larger and larger number of processors on fixed-scaled problems.