Software engineering in parallel and distributed scientific computing: a case study from industrial practice
Peter Luksch, Ursula Maier, Sabine Rathmayer, Matthias Weidmann, Friedemann Unger, Peter Bastian, Volker Reichenberger, A. Haas · 2002
We report on results from an interdisciplinary research project of computer scientists, mechanical engineers and numerical analysts from industry and academia. We have designed and implemented a portable distributed memory parallel version of CFX-TfC, a state of the art computational fluid dynamics simulation software package that features finite volume discretization on unstructured hybrid grids in combination with an algebraic multigrid solver. Performance results on a number of parallel hardware platforms indicate high efficiency and scalability. Systematic application of software engineering methods has been a key contribution to success and helped to avoid bottlenecks found in many other parallel CFD codes. A key module of TfC, the algebraic multigrid solver (AMG), has been re-designed according to the object oriented paradigm. The object oriented (OO) AMG solver has been implemented in C++. OO technology has increased the solver's maintainability and readability. Run-time efficie...