Assessing the potential of Microsoft Azure for computational studies of the aerodynamics of animal flight
WARNING: this is work in progress.
In 2016, we received a Microsoft Azure Sponsorship with a credit of $20,000 to use the cloud platform with our in-house Computational Fluid Dynamics software PetIBM.
PetIBM solves the 2D and 3D Navier-Stokes equations on structured Cartesian grids with an immersed-boundary method.
PetIBM relies on the PETSc library for data structures and parallel routines and run on distributed-memory architectures. With PetIBM, the user has the possibility to solve the linear systems on CPUs with the PETSc KSP object or on distributed CUDA-capable GPU devices with the NVIDIA AmgX library.
We used PetIBM to solve the three-dimensional flow around a cylinder with an anatomically accurate cross-section of a flying snake, the Chrysopelea paradisi. The runs were submitted to Microsoft Azure.
The present repository contains all input files and post-processing scripts used for this study.
Contact
Olivier Mesnard (mesnardo@gwu.edu)