Simulation of Supersonic Flow about a Circular Cylinder (figure)

Simulation of Supersonic Flow about a Circular Cylinder (figure)Simulation of Homogeneous, Compressible Turbulence
(Figure)

Researchers:
David Porter, Paul Woodward, and Sarah Anderson
Army High Performance Computing Research Center, Minneapolis, MN

(full size: 470k)

This figure shows a perspective volume rendering of the magnitude of the vorticity in a slice 128 cells thick taken from our simulation of homogeneous, compressible turbulence on a grid of 1024x1024x1024 cells. We used our PPM gas dynamics code implemented on an array of 16 Silicon Graphics (SGI) Challenge XL servers, each with 20 100-Mhz MIPS R-4400 processors and 1.75 Gbyte memory. SGI built this computing system expressly for this turbulence grand challenge computation, the largest turbulence simulation, to our knowledge, ever performed to date. At the bottom of the figure, volume renderings of filtered vorticity data from this run gives glimpses of the vortex structures characteristic of the Kolmogorov inertial range, where the effects of viscosity are unimportant.