An object oriented approach to boundary conditions in finite difference fluid dynamics codes

Parallel computers have been used to solve computational fluid dynamics (CFD) problems for many years; however, while the hardware has greatly improved, the software methods for describing CFD algorithms have remained largely unchanged. From the physics and software engineering points of view, the boundary conditions consume most of the algorithmic development and programming time, but only a small part of the execution time. This paper describes a methodology that eliminates most of the coding work that is required to implement boundary conditions thereby freeing the researcher to concentrate his time on the algorithms