This paper focuses on the parallel performance of two high-performance aerodynamic simulation packages on the newly installed NASA Columbia supercomputer. These packages include both a high-fidelity, unstructured, Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes solver, and a fully-automated inviscid flow package for cut-cell Cartesian grids. The complementary combination of these two simulation codes enables high-fidelity characterization of aerospace vehicle design performance over the entire flight envelope through extensive parametric analysis and detailed simulation of critical regions of the flight envelope. Both packages are industrial-level codes designed for complex geometry and incorporate customized multigrid solution algorithms. The performance of these codes on Columbia is examined using both MPI and OpenMP and using both the NUMAlink and InfiniBand interconnect fabrics. Numerical results demonstrate good scalability on up to 2016 cpus using the NUMAlink4 interconnect, with measured computational rates in the vicinity of 3 TFLOP/s, while InfiniBand showed some performance degradation at high CPU counts, particularly with multigrid. Nonetheless, the results are encouraging enough to indicate that larger test cases using combined MPI/OpenMP communication should scale well on even more processors.

An efficient three-dimensional unstructured Euler solver has been parallelized on a Cray Y-MP C90 shared memory computer and on an Intel Touchstone Delta distributed memory computer. Both machines yield comparable performance rates. However, the availability of sophisticated software tools enabled the parallelization of EUL3D on the shared memory vector/parallel CRAY Y-MP C90 with minimal user input. On the other hand, the implementation on the distributed memory massively parallel architecture of the Intel Touchstone Delta machine is considerably more involved. As massively parallel software tools become more mature, the task of developing or porting software to such machines should diminish. It has also been shown that with today's supercomputers, and with efficient codes such as EUL3D, the aerodynamic characteristics of complex vehicles can be computed in a matter of minutes, making design use feasible.>