Parallel performance comparison of different CFD solvers and overset libraries for store separation analyses

Abstract

The present work attempts to provide, for the first time to the best of the authors’ knowledge, a comprehensive comparison study about the parallel performance of different Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) codes which utilize the overset method to account for the relative motion in the computational domain which is required by the store separation simulations. Two commercial codes (Ansys Fluent and Simcenter STAR-CCM) and two open-source implementations were compared using a generic test case from the open literature utilizing the same mesh, the same hardware, and as much as possible, the same settings. The first open-source implementation was taken from a previous work of the first author, and the second implementation is presented in this work. The scalability and efficiency for the four codes were evaluated up to 2,048 processor cores. The results show that, the open-source implementations performance is satisfactory and even outperform the commercial codes (specially the second implementation) for the tested case.