Next-generation HPC models for future rotorcraft applications

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the performance of various CFD and structural dynamics simulation tools on HPC architectures for rotorcraft applications, highlighting PyFR's superior speed and scalability on GPU clusters.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of commercial and open-source simulation software on HPC hardware, demonstrating PyFR's efficiency and scalability for rotorcraft engineering simulations.

Findings

PyFR achieves up to 8 times faster solutions than Fluent and STAR-CCM+ in CFD simulations.

All models show good weak and strong scaling on up to 48 GPU nodes.

ABAQUS's iterative solver outperforms the direct solver in speed and memory usage.

Abstract

Rotorcraft technologies pose great scientific and industrial challenges for numerical computing. As available computational resources approach the exascale, finer scales and therefore more accurate simulations of engineering test cases become accessible. However, shifting legacy workflows and optimizing parallel efficiency and scalability of existing software on new hardware is often demanding. This paper reports preliminary results in CFD and structural dynamics simulations using the T106A Low Pressure Turbine (LPT) blade geometry on Leonardo S.p.A.'s davinci-1 high-performance computing (HPC) facility. Time to solution and scalability are assessed for commercial packages Ansys Fluent, STAR-CCM+, and ABAQUS, and the open-source scientific computing framework PyFR. In direct numerical simulations of compressible fluid flow, normalized time to solution values obtained using PyFR are found to be up to 8 times smaller than those obtained using Fluent and STAR-CCM+. The findings extend to the incompressible case. All models offer weak and strong scaling in tests performed on up to 48 compute nodes, each with 4 Nvidia A100 GPUs. In linear elasticity simulations with ABAQUS, both the iterative solver and the direct solver provide speedup in preliminary scaling tests, with the iterative solver outperforming the direct solver in terms of time-to-solution and memory usage. The results provide a first indication of the potential of HPC architectures in scaling engineering applications towards certification by simulation, and the first step for the Company towards the use of cutting-edge HPC toolkits in the field of Rotorcraft technologies.