MPI-Parallel Discrete Adjoint OpenFOAM

OpenFOAM is a powerful Open-Source (GPLv3) Computational Fluid Dynamics tool box with a rising adoption in both academia and industry due to its continuously growing set of features and the lack of license costs. Our previously developed discrete adjoint version of OpenFOAM allows us to calculate derivatives of arbitrary objectives with respect to a potentially very large number of input parameters at a relative (to a single primal flow simulation) computational cost which is independent of that number. Discrete adjoint OpenFOAM enables us to run gradient-based methods such as topology optimization efficiently. Up until recently only a serial version was available limiting both the computing performance and the amount of memory available for the solution of the problem. In this paper we describe a first parallel version of discrete adjoint OpenFOAM based on our adjoint MPI library.