Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is the main field of computational mechanics that has historically benefited from advances in high-performance computing. High-performance computing involves several techniques to make a simulation efficient and fast, such as distributed memory parallelism, shared memory parallelism, vectorization, memory access optimizations, etc. As an introduction, we present the anatomy of supercomputers, with special emphasis on HPC aspects relevant to CFD. Then, we develop some of the HPC concepts and numerical techniques applied to the complete CFD simulation framework: from preprocess (meshing) to postprocess (visualization) through the simulation itself (assembly and iterative solvers).

Part of the research developments and results presented in this chapter were funded by: the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme (2014–2020) and from Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation through Rede Nacional de Pesquisa (RNP) under the HPC4E Project, grant agreement 689772; EoCoE, a project funded by the European Union Contract H2020-EINFRA-2015-1-676629; PRACE Type C and Type A projects.

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