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

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

Microsoft Institute for High Performance ComputingDr 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.”

3www.mihpc.net

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

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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

Ship hanger aerodynamics

rotor

wind

• Wind tunnel measurements

• Vorticity or swirl contours

• Velocity vectors• Complex• Dynamic

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-way coupling for first time

Mic

roso

ft C

onfi

denti

al

FSX

ESP-HPC server architecture

control input

audio/visual

6 dof flight model

Change Rotor state

CFD

Rotor forces

SimulatorSimulator Flight Flight modelmodel

WHPCSWHPCS20082008

Demo architecture

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C#

Head node

Compute nodes

Two-way comms

SimConnect

WCF Broker

Simulator

Windows HPC Server 2008Flight simulator

Flight model

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

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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

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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

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C#

Head node Compute nodes

Two-way comms

WCF Broker

Windows HPC Server 2008

Flight model

Velocity

WCF service

WCF broker performance

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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

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Ship airflow

Rotor downwash

Windows HPC service

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Let’s fly....

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Let’s fly....

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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

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

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Contact: Dr Kenji Takeda (ktakeda@soton.ac.uk),Microsoft Institute for High Performance Computing, School of Engineering Sciences, University of Southampton, UK