Computing Past Cylinder Flows

Abstract

In this work a numerical study of flow past circular cylinders is presented. The
simulations are carried out using two different computational codes both written in the
context of the finite element method. One of them is an optimized code developed in the
framework of PETSc libraries able to run in parallel using an interconnected system of
personal computers. The other one is a conventional serial code. The objectives of this
analysis are: to check the capabilities of a cluster composed of four nodes, to test the
performance of the proposed codes in the analysis of highly time dependent problems, to
perform comparisons with results obtained by using different convergence strategies and to
verify the behavior of alternative solvers.