The direct-hybrid method for computational aeroacoustics on HPC systems

Abstract

Classic hybrid methods for computational aeroacoustics use different solvers and methods to predict the flow field and the acoustic pressure field in two separate steps, which involves data exchange via disk I/O between the solvers. This limits the efficiency of the approach, as parallel I/O usually does not scale well to large numbers of cores. In this work, a highly scalable direct-hybrid scheme is presented, in which both the flow and the acoustics simulations run simultaneously. That is, all data between the two solvers is transferred in-memory, avoiding the restrictions of the I/O subsystem. Results for the simulation of a pair of co-rotating vortices show that the method is able to correctly predict the acoustic pressure field and that it is suitable for highly parallel simulations.