A rule-based specification system for computational fluid dynamics

This study seeks to reduce the complexity and associated costs of developing computation fluid dynamics simulation software. A high level rule-based specification language is proposed as an approach to reducing the complexity of simulation software. The proposed specification language, using a mixture of declarative single-assignment semantics and domain specific mapping operators, provides a means of automatically assembling numerical simulation components. As a result of both the high level of specification and the automatic assembly process, much of the more mundane implementation issues involved in traditional Fortran based specifications are eliminated.; In addition to a description of the proposed specification language, this study develops numerical simulation software for compressible flows that include finite-rate chemical kinetics. This application is used as a illustration the proposed rule-based approach in the development of complex numerical software. The numerical software is validated against several test cases using a five species chemically reacting model for air including a high temperature supersonic diffuser nozzle and a Mach 10 blunt body geometry. The performance of this application is measured and found to be competitive with a representative Fortran simulation. The growth of scheduling overhead incurred when using the rule-based approach is also measured. The results of these measurements indicate that the scheduling costs will remain small even for large simulation meshes.