The methods employed in solving the fluid dynamic equations are especially amenable to parallel techniques. In fact, one of the major forces behind the development of ILLIAC IV was the solution of hydrodynamic problems. During the early phases of ILLIAC IV development, (mid 1970 to 1971), the Air Force Weapons Lab expended several manyears of effort in converting its hydrocodes to the ILLIAC IV architecture. This has been reported in AFWLTR 72-33 "Shell for the ILLIAC IV". The experience has carried over into the codes presently used at AFWL which have many characteristics necessary for parallel processing. Applications of the parallel philosophy to serial machines has decreased running times by a factor of 2 or more. Our original single material hydrocode ran at the rate of approximately 1.5ms/zone/cycle on the CDC6600. The present version runs at about 0.5ms/zone/cycle.
The Air Force Weapons Laboratory (AFWL) has maintained a strong interest in large scale fluid dynamics problems since its establishment some ten years ago. Typically, these problems have a spatial extent which changes by several orders of magnitude between the initial conditions and the solution of interest. Time variations of orders of magnitude are also possible. In any case the large scale fluid dynamics problems solved by AFWL may be defined as those in which the smallest lineal resolution desired is less than one percent of the total dimension of interest. A large number of problems fit into this category in two and three dimensions. The AFWL has developed a system of solution for such problems which is easy to use, adaptable to many different problems and computers, and, most importantly, extremely accurate. This system is represented by the HULL code. The basic part of the code is a second order accurate, multi-dimensional Eulerian hydrodynamic code. The differencing method was developed by Capt D. Matuska at AFWL and is itself unique.
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