Title: UNSTEADY SEPARATED FLOW SIMULATIONS USING PARALLEL COMPUTERS

ABSTRACT
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The possibility of predicting the full three-dimensional unsteady
separated flow around complex ship and helicopter geometries is explored
using unstructured grids with a parallel flow solver. The flow solver
used is a modified version of the Parallel Unstructured Maritime
Aerodynamics (PUMA) software, which was written by Dr. Christopher
Bruner as part of his doctoral thesis at the Virginia Polytechnic
Institute and State University. The efficiency and accuracy of PUMA at
resolving several steady state solutions and a fully three-dimensional
unsteady separated flow around a sphere were studied in order to
determine if it was a suitable platform to base future work on. COst
effective COmputing Array (COCOA), a powerful Beowulf cluster, was also
built and tested as a part of the effort to make all this possible at
a very economic cost. Unstructured grids were utilized in order to
maximize the number of cells in the area of interest, while minimizing
cells in the far field. A high level of clustering is required to solve
viscous unsteady problems, and unstructured grids offer the least
expensive method to ensure this. NASA's VGrid package was used to
generate the unstructured grids.
