An Efficient Parallel Implementation of the Runge–Kutta Discontinuous Galerkin Method with Weighted Essentially Non-Oscillatory Limiters on Three-Dimensional Unstructured Meshes

Abstract

In computational fluid dynamics, high-order solvers suitable for three-dimensional unstructured meshes are attractive but are less developed than other methods. In this article, we provide the formulation and a parallel implementation of the Runge–Kutta discontinuous Galerkin finite element method with weighted essentially non-oscillatory limiters, which are compact and effective for suppressing numerical oscillations near discontinuities. In our experiments, high-order solvers do outperform their low-order counterparts in accuracy and the efficient parallel implementation makes the time cost affordable for large problems. Such high-order parallel solvers are efficient tools for solving conservative laws including the Euler system that models inviscid compressible flows.

Keywords

• high-order CFD solvers
• discontinuous Galerkin methods
• WENO limiters
• three-dimensional unstructured meshes
• distributed memory parallelization