CFD technology development at NASA Ames - A mission computing perspective

To accomplish NASA missions, it is required to develop advanced aerospace vehicles and operating systems. Since a test-fail-fix approach is very expensive and time consuming for developing advanced vehicles, it has become more economical to utilize computational approaches. Scientists and engineers at NASA Ames Research Center (Ames) began developing computational flow modeling methods for aerodynamic problems as early as the late 1960s. As the high-performance computing technologies advance in conjunction with the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility located at Ames, researchers have made breakthroughs in numerical methods and have performed milestone-setting applications while supporting NASA missions. The current report is intended to present our view on the historical role Ames has played in advancing the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technology starting from the development of fundamental algorithms and codes for aeronautics leading to the current state-of-the-art flow simulations in support of NASA's aerospace missions.