Parallel linear multigrid by agglomeration for the acceleration of 3D compressible flow calculations on unstructured meshes

Abstract

In this paper, we report on our recent efforts concerning the design of parallel linear multigrid algorithms for the acceleration of 3-dimensional compressible flow calculations. The multigrid strategy adopted in this study relies on a volume agglomeration principle for the construction of the coarse grids starting from a fine discretization of the computational domain. In the past, this strategy has mainly been studied in the 2-dimensional case for the solution of the Euler equations (see Lallemand et al. [6]), the laminar Navier–Stokes equations (see Mavriplis and Venkatakrishnan [12]) and the turbulent Navier–Stokes equations (see Carré [1], Mavriplis [10] and Francescatto and Dervieux [4]). A first extension to the 3-dimensional case is presented by Mavriplis and Venkatakrishnan in [13] and more recently in Mavriplis and Pirzadeh [11]. The main contribution of the present work is twofold: on the one hand, we demonstrate the successful extension and application of the multigrid by a volume agglomeration principle to the acceleration of complex 3-dimensional flow calculations on unstructured tetrahedral meshes and, on the other hand, we enhance further the efficiency of the methodology through its adaptation to parallel architectures. Moreover, a nontrivial aspect of this work is that the corresponding software developments are taking place in an existing industrial flow solver.