The Navier-Stokes computer
Muhammed Ehteshamul Hayder · 1988
A new scientific supercomputer, known as the Navier-Stokes Computer (NSC), has been designed. The NSC is a multi-purpose machine, and for applications in the field of computational fluid dynamics (CFD), this supercomputer is expected to yield a computational speed far exceeding that of the present day supercomputers. This computer has a few very powerful processors (known as nodes) connected by an internodal network. There are three versions of the NSC nodes: micro-, mini- and full-node. The micro-node was developed to prove, to demonstrate and to refine the key architectural features of the NSC. In this thesis, the architectures of the two recent versions of the NSC nodes are presented, with the main focus on the full-node. At a clock speed of 20 MHz, the mini- and the full-node have peak computational speeds of 200 and 640 MFLOPS respectively. The full-node is the final version for the NSC nodes and an NSC is expected to have 128 full-nodes. To test the suitability of different algorithms on the NSC architecture, an NSC simulator was developed. Some of the existing computational fluid dynamics codes were placed on this simulator to determine important and relevant issues relating to the efficient use of the NSC architecture. The goal of this analysis was to identify particular strengths and weaknesses of the NSC architecture, in addition to strategies of the mapping of specific CFD algorithms to the NSC. Simulaton results indicate the high effectiveness of the NSC architecture for the scientific computations.