ABSTRACT

The use of computers in heat transfer and fluid flow has become so commonplace today that no one would consider working in either field without some knowledge of computing. Some of the earliest computing efforts were spent on obtaining solutions to specific heat transfer and fluid flow problems. While such problems solved using computers over 30 years ago are now considered trivial exercises, they were run on what were then considered state-of-the-art, or high-performance computers. Solving 3-D problems with up to 640K available memory was extraordinary. When mentioning such problems and computer systems to students today, most laugh and wonder how one lived without a PC and access to the web. When one sees how far we have come in just a few decades, it is truly amazing to have ready access to tremendously powerful machines and software right from our desk. What is even more amazing is what is yet to come – both at the PC level and at the high-performance end of computing. Problems are now being solved on a daily basis that even a few years ago were considered intractable. While we once thought that a problem with a few million nodes was huge a few years ago, researchers are now considering problems with over 100 million nodes. At such levels of detail, one can begin to model processes at the micro level of physics. When researchers are able to quickly analyze these gigantic data sets and can generate insightful graphical displays, the understanding of fundamental processes and governing relations will escalate tremendously.