Clinton P. T. Groth, Kalvin Tsang, Jai Sachdev

A Block-Based Parallel Implicit Adaptive Mesh Refinement Algorithm for Compressible Gas Dynamics

A highly parallelized implicit adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) algorithm will be presented for the system of hyperbolic partial-differential equations governing steady two-dimensional inviscid compressible gaseous flows. The AMR algorithm uses a high-resolution upwind finite-volume spatial discretization procedure in conjunction with limited linear solution reconstruction and Riemann-solver based flux functions to solve the governing equations on multi-block mesh composed of structured curvilinear blocks with quadrilateral computational cells. A flexible block-based hierarchical data structure is used to facilitate automatic solution-directed mesh adaptation according to physics-based refinement criteria. A matrix-free inexact Newton method is used to solve the system of nonlinear equations arising from this finite-volume spatial discretization procedure and a preconditioned generalized minimal residual (GMRES) method is used to solve the resulting non-symmetric system of linear equations at each step of the Newton algorithm. Right preconditioning of linear system is used to improve performance of the Krylov subspace method. An additive Schwarz global preconditioner with variable overlap is used in conjunction with block incomplete LU (BILU) type preconditioners based on the Jacobian of the first-order upwind scheme for each sub-domain. The Schwarz preconditioning and block-based data structure readily allow efficient and scalable parallel implementations of the implicit AMR approach on distributed-memory multi-processor architectures. Numerical results will be described for several flow cases, demonstrating both the effectiveness of the mesh adaptation and algorithm parallel performance. Parallel implementation, startup issues, and the influences of overlap and fill level on the effectiveness of the preconditioning will also be discussed. The proposed parallel implicit AMR method appears appears to be well suited for predicting complex flows with disparate spatial and temporal scales in a reliable and efficient fashion.