Parallel 3D airflow simulation on workstation clusters

Thesee is a 3D panel method code, which calculates the characteristic of a wing in an inviscid, incompressible, irrotational, and steady airflow, in order to design new paragliders and sails. In this paper, we present the parallelisation of Thesee for low cost workstation/PC clusters. Thesee has been parallelised using the ScaLAPACK library routines in a systematic manner that lead to a low cost development. The code written in C is thus very portable since it uses only high level libraries. This design was very efficient in term of manpower and gave good performance results. The code performances were measured on 3 clusters of computers connected by different LANs : an Ethernet LAN of SUN SPARCstation, an ATM LAN of SUN SPARCstation and a Myrinet LAN of PCs. The last one was the less expensive and gave the best timing results and super-linear speedup.