STRATEGIC ICT SUMMIT

1. STRATEGIC ICT SUMMIT • FEBRUARY 3 – 4, 2009 Name: Dr Kenji Takeda Organisation: School of Engineering Sciences, University of Southampton Contact Information: ktakeda@soton.ac.uk

2. Real-time Computational Fluid Dynamics for Flight Simulation James Kenny, Dr Steven Johnston, Dr Kenji Takeda & Prof Simon CoxMicrosoft Institute for High Performance Computing

3. Microsoft Institute for High Performance Computing Dr Kenji Takeda & Prof. Simon Cox “Our aim is to demonstrate why, where, and how we are exploiting current and future Microsoft tools and technologies to make the engineering design process faster, cheaper and better.” www.mihpc.net

4. High performance flight simulator • Simulate helicopter landing on a ship using flight simulator • Pilot control • Visualisation • Real-time, interactive HPC computation on cluster to drive flight physics • Unsteady CFD simulation • Coupling simulator to HPC • SOA/WCF interoperability

5. Ship-aircraft interaction proof-of-concept • Landing on a ship is hard • Requirement to qualify each ship/aircraft combination • Complex unsteady aerodynamics problem • Two-way aerodynamic interaction between ship wake and rotor not currently computed in simulators • Training & research applications

6. Ship hanger aerodynamics rotor • Wind tunnel measurements • Vorticity or swirl contours • Velocity vectors • Complex • Dynamic wind

7. Coupling Simulator to CFD • Couple human-in-the loop Simulator to CFD • Use C# for flight model • CFD inputs to flight model and affected by rotor aerodynamics • Differing timescales • Full two-waycoupling for first time

8. ESP-HPC server architecture FSX SimConnect WHPCS 2008 Flight model Simulator control input Change Rotor state CFD audio/visual 6 dof flight model Rotor forces

9. Demo architecture Windows HPC Server 2008 Flight simulator Simulator Compute nodes Head node Flight model SimConnect C# Two-way comms WCF Broker

10. Key HPC architecture features • Massively parallel Message Passing Interface (MPI) CFD code for flow simulation • Velocity distributed cache • Windows Communication Foundation broker • C# flight model • SimConnect WCF API • ESP flight simulator visualisation and pilot input

11. Parallel CFD Code • Solves Navier-Stokes equations for fluid flow – hard problem • Message Passing Interface (MPI) for distributed computing • Using MPI.NET for demo • Can runs on national supercomputers up to 2048+ processors • Quickly ported to Windows HPC

12. WCF Broker capability • Allows two-way communication with a running job • Designed for Monte-Carlo simulations • Velocity distributed cache to gather data from MPI job • Enables Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) scenarios Windows HPC Server 2008 Compute nodes Head node Flight model C# Velocity Two-way comms WCF service WCF Broker

13. WCF broker performance

14. Flight model and simulator • Flight model in C# • helicopter dynamics and CFD interaction effects • Full two way interaction • WCF via SimConnect API • pass data between flight model and ESP simulation engine • ESP for pilot input and visualisation Ship airflow Rotor downwash

15. Windows HPC service

16. Let’s fly....

17. Let’s fly....

18. Helicopter Brownout Physics • New project to study brownout from first principles • Current saltation models based on parallel flow assumptions • Using Southampton expertise from medical engineering and Aeolian transport • First principles physics modelling • needs HPC and GPGPU

19. Real-time CFD for Flight Simulation • Human-in-the-loop flight simulator • Flexible, high performance application framework • Windows HPC Server 2008 parallel CFD simulation • High performance for high fidelity physics • Windows HPC Server 2008 WCF SOA demonstration • Real-time interactivity using WCF • Opens up new avenues for first-principles physics modelling with human-in-the-loop simulators Contact: Dr Kenji Takeda (ktakeda@soton.ac.uk), Microsoft Institute for High Performance Computing, School of Engineering Sciences, University of Southampton, UK