AFWL hydrocode development parallel techniques fluid dynamics

The methods employed in solving the fluid dynamic equations are especially amenable to parallel techniques. In fact, one of the major forces behind the development of ILLIAC IV was the solution of hydrodynamic problems. During the early phases of ILLIAC IV development, (mid 1970 to 1971), the Air Force Weapons Lab expended several manyears of effort in converting its hydrocodes to the ILLIAC IV architecture. This has been reported in AFWLTR 72-33 “Shell for the ILLIAC IV” The experience has carried over into the codes presently used at AFWL which have many characteristics necessary for parallel processing. Applications of the parallel philosophy to serial machines has decreased running times by a factor of 2 or more. Our original single material hydrocode ran at the rate of approximately 1.5ms/zone/cycle on the CDC6600. The present version runs at about 0.5ms/zone/cycle.