The Hartree Centre is developing a Virtual Wind Tunnel (VWT) as a more cost-effective and time-saving alternative to expensive physical wind tunnel. VWT is a simulation that applies computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to a virtual design, replicating early wind tunnel tests, so the customer can proceed to a later stage in the optimisation process before the physical wind tunnel tests are needed. The Virtual Wind Tunnel is designed to bring the power of High-Performance Computing to non-HPC experts. A comprehensive workflow has been developed to build the wind tunnel environment, automate the domain decomposition, produce an automatic mesh from a 3D model file (.obj / .stl), automatically configure the CFD engine, and submit the job onto Scafell Pike. Therefore, condensing 20+ complex command lines to one simple command line, removing the complexity of a virtual wind tunnel simulation for a non-technical user, but still running the same high-quality simulation.
I am an RSE working at STFC's supercomputing centre, the Hartree Centre. I am interested in automated workflows, cloud computing, HPC, best practices, and industry collaboration.
