Pratt & Whitney INCITE Work on Argonne BlueGene/L Leads to Combustor Design Speedup

Pratt & Whitney has been exploring leading-edge combustor design using the BlueGene/L supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory as part of DOE's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. The unique BlueGene architecture identified a bottleneck in an I/O algorithm used in Pratt & Whitney's ALLSTAR computational fluid dynamics solver. Analysis by P&W and Argonne personnel led to an alternate approach that not only alleviated the issue, it reduces the run time of P&W's combustor design simulations by a full day. Pratt & Whitney, a United Technologies Company, is a world leader in the design, manufacture, and service of aircraft engines, industrial gas turbines, and space propulsion systems.