Galerkin projection of discrete fields via supermesh construction

Interpolation of discrete FIelds arises frequently in computational physics. This thesis focuses on the novel implementation and analysis of Galerkin projection, an interpolation technique with three principal advantages over its competitors: it is optimally accurate in the L2 norm, it is conservative, and it is well-defined in the case of spaces of discontinuous functions. While these desirable properties have been known for some time, the implementation of Galerkin projection is challenging; this thesis reports the first successful general implementation. A thorough review of the history, development and current frontiers of adaptive remeshing is given. Adaptive remeshing is the primary motivation for the development of Galerkin projection, as its use necessitates the interpolation of discrete fields. The Galerkin projection is discussed and the geometric concept necessary for its implementation, the supermesh, is introduced. The efficient local construction of the supermesh of two meshes by the intersection of the elements of the input meshes is then described. Next, the element-element association problem of identifying which elements from the input meshes intersect is analysed. With efficient algorithms for its construction in hand, applications of supermeshing other than Galerkin projections are discussed, focusing on the computation of diagnostics of simulations which employ adaptive remeshing. Examples demonstrating the effectiveness and efficiency of the presented algorithms are given throughout. The thesis closes with some conclusions and possibilities for future work

Méthodes avancées pour les maillages dans le calcul haute performance des simulations d'explosion

Des améliorations considérables ont été apportées à la simulation numérique par LES (Large Eddy Simulation) au cours des trente dernières années. Cela a été possible grâce à l'introduction de méthodes numériques plus robustes, à l'amélioration de la modélisation des conditions aux limites et à l'utilisation de produits chimiques plus précis et détaillés dans le domaine de la combustion. Le calcul haute performance est un facteur clé. Le calcul haute performance est un facteur clé pour que ces simulations puissent être réalisées dans un délai raisonnable et utiliser des géométries représentatives réalistes à grande échelle. Malgré les avancées dans tous ces domaines, le goulot d'étranglement pour la résolution de ces problèmes reste la résolution/qualité du maillage initial. L'objectif de cette thèse est d'abord de comprendre pourquoi la résolution du maillage est importante grâce à l'analyse de la stabilité globale, puis d'atténuer ce problème en utilisant l'adaptation dynamique du maillage pour les problèmes d'explosion liés à la combustion. La première partie du manuscrit traite de l'analyse de stabilité globale (GSA) de l'équation de convection-diffusion linéaire (LCDE) et de l'équation de convection-diffusion-réaction linéaire (LCDRE) pour les écoulements sans réaction et avec réaction respectivement. Cette analyse montre l'importance des paramètres non dimensionnels tels que le nombre CFL Nc, le nombre de Peclet Pe et le nombre de Damkohler, Da sur la stabilité, la nature dispersive et diffusive du schéma numérique choisi (schémas Lax-Wendroff et TTGC). L'analyse met en évidence l'importance de la résolution du maillage pour obtenir une solution précise et stable pour tout problème numérique. En particulier, lors de la résolution de problèmes réalistes d'écoulement réactif, il est primordial de résoudre le front de flamme de manière adéquate pour obtenir des solutions précises. Pour surmonter ce problème, lors de la résolution de simulations réalistes d'écoulement réactif à grande échelle, il est utile d'utiliser le raffinement dynamique du maillage en cours d'exécution pour des raisons de précision et de coût. Dans la deuxième partie du manuscrit, deux techniques différentes d'adaptation dynamique du maillage sont expliquées. Bien qu'utilisant un algorithme générique similaire, les différences entre les deux techniques sont détaillées. Plusieurs cas de test sont simulés pour valider les techniques d'adaptation. Une quantité d'intérêt (QOI) appropriée est choisie en fonction du cas étudié. À l'aide de cette quantité d'intérêt, deux cas d'essai d'écoulement réactif à grande échelle, compressible et turbulent sont simulés en utilisant l'adaptation dynamique du maillage dans le but d'obtenir la même précision tout en obtenant des avantages en termes de performance

Domain decomposition preconditioners for higher-order discontinuous Galerkin discretizations

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, February 2012."September 2011." Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 147-155).Aerodynamic flows involve features with a wide range of spatial and temporal scales which need to be resolved in order to accurately predict desired engineering quantities. While computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has advanced considerably in the past 30 years, the desire to perform more complex, higher-fidelity simulations remains. Present day CFD simulations are limited by the lack of an efficient high-fidelity solver able to take advantage of the massively parallel architectures of modern day supercomputers. A higher-order hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) discretization combined with an implicit solution method is proposed as a means to attain engineering accuracy at lower computational cost. Domain decomposition methods are studied for the parallel solution of the linear system arising at each iteration of the implicit scheme. A minimum overlapping additive Schwarz (ASM) preconditioner and a Balancing Domain Decomposition by Constraints (BDDC) preconditioner are developed for the HDG discretization. An algebraic coarse space for the ASM preconditioner is developed based on the solution of local harmonic problems. The BDDC preconditioner is proven to converge at a rate independent of the number of subdomains and only weakly dependent on the solution order or the number of elements per subdomain for a second-order elliptic problem. The BDDC preconditioner is extended to the solution of convection-dominated problems using a Robin-Robin interface condition. An inexact BDDC preconditioner is developed based on incomplete factorizations and a p-multigrid type coarse grid correction. It is shown that the incomplete factorization of the singular linear systems corresponding to local Neumann problems results in a nonsingular preconditioner. The inexact BDDC preconditioner converges in a similar number of iterations as the exact BDDC method, with significantly reduced CPU time. The domain decomposition preconditioners are extended to solve the Euler and Navier- Stokes systems of equations. An analysis is performed to determine the effect of boundary conditions on the convergence of domain decomposition methods. Optimized Robin-Robin interface conditions are derived for the BDDC preconditioner which significantly improve the performance relative to the standard Robin-Robin interface conditions. Both ASM and BDDC preconditioners are applied to solve several fundamental aerodynamic flows. Numerical results demonstrate that for high-Reynolds number flows, solved on anisotropic meshes, a coarse space is necessary in order to obtain good performance on more than 100 processors.by Laslo Tibor Diosady.Ph.D

Anisotropic output-based adaptation with tetrahedral cut cells for compressible flows

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2008.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections."September 2008."Includes bibliographical references (leaves 153-164).Anisotropic, adaptive meshing for flows around complex, three-dimensional bodies remains a barrier to increased automation in computational fluid dynamics. Two specific advances are introduced in this thesis. First, a finite-volume discretization for tetrahedral cut-cells is developed that makes possible robust, anisotropic adaptation on complex bodies. Through grid refinement studies on inviscid flows, this cut-cell discretization is shown to produce similar accuracy as boundary-conforming meshes with a small increase in the degrees of freedom. The cut-cell discretization is then combined with output-based error estimation and anisotropic adaptation such that the mesh size and shape are controlled by the output error estimate and the Hessian (i.e. second derivatives) of the Mach number, respectively. Using a parallel implementation, this output-based adaptive method is applied to a series of sonic boom test cases and the automated ability to correctly estimate pressure signatures at several body lengths is demonstrated starting with initial meshes of a few thousand control volumes. Second, a new framework for adaptation is introduced in which error estimates are directly controlled by removing the common intermediate step of specifying a desired mesh size and shape. As a result, output error control can be achieved without the adhoc selection of a specific field (such as Mach number) to control anisotropy, rather anisotropy in the mesh naturally results from both the primal and dual solutions. Furthermore, the direct error control extends naturally to higher-order discretizations for which the use of a Hessian is no longer appropriate to determine mesh shape. The direct error control adaptive method is demonstrated on a series of simple test cases to control interpolation error and discontinuous Galerkin finite element output error. This new direct method produces grids with less elements but the same accuracy as existing metric-based approaches.by Michael Andrew Park.Ph.D

Very high-order methods for 3D arbitrary unstructured grids

Understanding the motion of fluids is crucial for the development and analysis of new designs and processes in science and engineering. Unstructured meshes are used in this context since they allow the analysis of the behaviour of complicated geometries and configurations that characterise the designs of engineering structures today. The existing numerical methods developed for unstructured meshes suffer from poor computational efficiency, and their applicability is not universal for any type of unstructured meshes. High-resolution high-order accurate numerical methods are required for obtaining a reasonable guarantee of physically meaningful results and to be able to accurately resolve complicated flow phenomena that occur in a number of processes, such as resolving turbulent flows, for direct numerical simulation of Navier-Stokes equations, acoustics etc. The aim of this research project is to establish and implement universal, high-resolution, very high-order, non-oscillatory finite-volume methods for 3D unstructured meshes. A new class of linear and WENO schemes of very high-order of accuracy (5 th ) has been developed. The key element of this approach is a high-order reconstruction process that can be applied to any type of meshes. The linear schemes which are suited for problems with smooth solutions, employ a single reconstruction polynomial obtained from a close spatial proximity. In the WENO schemes the reconstruction polynomials, arising from different topological regions, are non-linearly combined to provide high-order of accuracy and shock capturing features. The performance of the developed schemes in terms of accuracy, non-oscillatory behaviour and flexibility to handle any type of 3D unstructured meshes has been assessed in a series of test problems. The linear and WENO schemes presented achieve very high-order of accuracy (5 th ). This is the first class of WENO schemes in the finite volume context that possess highorder of accuracy and robust non-oscillatory behaviour for any type of unstructured meshes. The schemes have been employed in a newly developed 3D unstructured solver (UCNS3D). UCNS3D utilises unstructured grids consisted of tetrahedrals, pyramids, prisms and hexahedral elements and has been parallelised using the MPI framework. The high parallel efficiency achieved enables the large scale computations required for the analysis of new designs and processes in science and engineering.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

A Unified Framework for Parallel Anisotropic Mesh Adaptation

Finite-element methods are a critical component of the design and analysis procedures of many (bio-)engineering applications. Mesh adaptation is one of the most crucial components since it discretizes the physics of the application at a relatively low cost to the solver. Highly scalable parallel mesh adaptation methods for High-Performance Computing (HPC) are essential to meet the ever-growing demand for higher fidelity simulations. Moreover, the continuous growth of the complexity of the HPC systems requires a systematic approach to exploit their full potential. Anisotropic mesh adaptation captures features of the solution at multiple scales while, minimizing the required number of elements. However, it also introduces new challenges on top of mesh generation. Also, the increased complexity of the targeted cases requires departing from traditional surface-constrained approaches to utilizing CAD (Computer-Aided Design) kernels. Alongside the functionality requirements, is the need of taking advantage of the ubiquitous multi-core machines. More importantly, the parallel implementation needs to handle the ever-increasing complexity of the mesh adaptation code. In this work, we develop a parallel mesh adaptation method that utilizes a metric-based approach for generating anisotropic meshes. Moreover, we enhance our method by interfacing with a CAD kernel, thus enabling its use on complex geometries. We evaluate our method both with fixed-resolution benchmarks and within a simulation pipeline, where the resolution of the discretization increases incrementally. With the Telescopic Approach for scalable mesh generation as a guide, we propose a parallel method at the node (multi-core) for mesh adaptation that is expected to scale up efficiently to the upcoming exascale machines. To facilitate an effective implementation, we introduce an abstract layer between the application and the runtime system that enables the use of task-based parallelism for concurrent mesh operations. Our evaluation indicates results comparable to state-of-the-art methods for fixed-resolution meshes both in terms of performance and quality. The integration with an adaptive pipeline offers promising results for the capability of the proposed method to function as part of an adaptive simulation. Moreover, our abstract tasking layer allows the separation of different aspects of the implementation without any impact on the functionality of the method

The development of problem solving environments for computational engineering.

This thesis presents two Problem Solving Environments that enable engineers in industry to utilise complex computational simulation algorithms during their design processes. The work addresses the issues of allowing the end user to interact with the algorithms in a user-friendly manner through the use of graphical user interface design and advanced computer graphics. Throughout this thesis major emphasis is placed on being able to tackle a wide range of problem sizes from routine to grand challenge simulations through the use of parallel computing hardware. The effectiveness of both the environments in their domain is demonstrated using a series of examples

Fluid-Structure Interaction Problems in Hemodynamics:Parallel Solvers, Preconditioners, and Applications

In this work we aim at the description, study and numerical investigation of the fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problem applied to hemodynamics. The FSI model considered consists of the Navier-Stokes equations on moving domains modeling blood as a viscous incompressible fluid and the elasticity equation modeling the arterial wall. The fluid equations are derived in an arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) frame of reference. Several existing formulations and discretizations are discussed, providing a state of the art on the subject. The main new contributions and advancements consist of: A description of the Newton method for FSI-ALE, with details on the implementation of the shape derivatives block assembling, considerations about parallel performance, the analytic derivation of the derivative terms for different formulations (conservative or not) and for different types of boundary conditions. The implementation and analysis of a new category of preconditioners for FSI (applicable also to more general coupled problems). The framework set up is general and extensible. The proposed preconditioners allow, in particular, a separate treatment of each field, using a different preconditioning strategy in each case. An estimate for the condition number of the preconditioned system is proposed, showing how preconditioners of this type depend on the coupling, and explaining the good performance they exhibit when increasing the number of processors. The improvement of the free (distributed under LGPL licence) parallel finite elements library LifeV. Most of the methods described have been implemented within this library during the period of this PhD and all the numerical tests reported were run using this framework. The simulation of clinical cases with patient-specific data and geometry, the comparison on simulations of physiological interest between different models (rigid, FSI, 1D), discretizations and methods to solve the nonlinear system. A methodology to obtain patient-specific FSI simulations starting from the raw medical data and using a set of free software tools is described. This pipeline from imaging to simulation can help medical doctors in diagnosis and decision making, and in understanding the implication of indicators such as the wall shear stress in the pathogenesis