OpenSBLI v3.0: High-fidelity multi-block transonic aerofoil CFD simulations using domain specific languages on GPUs

Abstract

OpenSBLI is an automatic code-generation framework for compressible Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations on heterogeneous computing architectures (previous release: Lusher et al. (2021) [4]). OpenSBLI is coupled to the Oxford Parallel Structured (OPS) Domain Specific Language (DSL), which uses source-to-source translation to enable parallel execution of the code on large-scale supercomputers, including multi-GPU clusters. To date, OpenSBLI has largely been applied to compressible turbulence and shock-wave/boundary-layer interactions on very simple geometries comprised of single mesh blocks with essentially orthogonal grid lines. OpenSBLI has been extended in this new release to target strongly curvilinear cases, including transonic aerofoils using multi-block grids. In addition to multi-block mesh support, more efficient numerical shock-capturing methods and filters have been added to the codebase. Improvements to post-processing, reduced-dimension data output, and coupling to a modal decomposition library are also included. A set of validation cases are presented to showcase the new code features. Furthermore, state-of-the-art wide-span transonic aerofoil simulations on up to $N=2.5\times {10}^9$ grid points demonstrate that wider aspect ratios can alter buffet predictions and increase the regularity of the low-frequency shock oscillations by accommodating fully-developed trailing edge flow separation. Spectral Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (SPOD) analysis showed that overly-narrow aerofoil simulations contain additional domain-dependent energy content at a Strouhal number of $St\approx 3$ associated with wake modes.