High-fidelity turbulence simulations are performed in a part of a heat exchanger tube bundle. The development of the flow is shown for 4 meshes of increasing size, each of the simulations being run using an optimal number of processors for the CFD software Code_Saturne on ARCHER. The 4 animations that make the full video are obtained from frames generated on the fly by an in-situ visualisation library (Catalyst) coupled with Code_Saturne. The largest simulation (bottom right animation) deals with an extremely large mesh of about 3.4 billion cells, and is performed using about 90% of the full ARCHER (98,304 processors/4,096 nodes). The 151 generated frames amount for about 50 megabytes of data. In comparison, traditional postprocessing relying on dumping data on disk would require about 4.5 terabytes of data, making them nearly impossible to be dealt with. ffmpeg is used to generate the final video.
Credit: Charles Moulinec (STFC, UKRI, UK)