Visualization of the computational grid for the airflow simulation around a plane. The colors indicate the different subdomains in a parallel simulation. Image: DLR.
FSDM supports different surface and volume elements for the discretization of the simulation domain. This example shows an adaptive refinement with prism elements which leads to so called “Hanging Nodes”. The numerical treatmen of hanging nodes is an area of active research. Image: DLR.
The FlowSimulator DataManager (FSDM) is a HPC-library for the storage and the parallel management of data from Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulations in aerospace. FSDM is an integral part of the FlowSimulator framework that allows performing simulations in CFD, in computational structure mechanics and in new disciplines like noise generation in fluid flow (aeroacoustic). The FlowSimulator software is jointly developed by Airbus, DLR, Onera and further European research institutes.
The basic idea of FSDM is to achieve an easy integration and an interoperability of different numerical tools since all meshes, geometries and simulation parameters are managed centrally. FSDM copes with different kinds of structured and unstructured meshes, allows meshes with hanging nodes and interpolates data between different meshes. Furthermore, it supports various common data formats for import and export such as HDF5, netCDF, CGNS and Tecplot.
Since accurate CFD simulations require fine meshes, such computations have to be performed on high-performance computers (HPC). For this purpose, a key feature of FSDM is its parallel scalability on HPC clusters. As a consequence, the core library of FSDM has been written in object-oriented C++ and is parallelized with MPI. The core library is complemented with a Python interface that also allows importing and accessing the C++ classes as Python modules. As a result, FSDM is a flexible library to easily combine different aerospace tools in one workflow.
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