Aerodynamics Analysis Acceleration through Reconfigurable Hardware

The long computation times required to simulate complete aircraft configurations remain as the main bottleneck in the design flow of new structures for the aeronautics industry. In this paper, the novel application of specific hardware in conjunction with conventional processors to accelerate Computational fluid dynamics is explored. First, some general facts about application-specific hardware are presented, placing the focus on the feasibility of the development of hardware modules (FPGAs based) for the acceleration of most time-consuming algorithms in aeronautics analysis. So, a practical methodology for developing an FPGA- based computing solution for the quasi ID Euler equations is applied to the Sod's "shock tube" problem. Results comparing CPU-based and FPGA-based solutions are presented, showing that speedups around two orders of magnitude can be expected from the FPGA-based implementation.