Keywords: high-performance computing, computational fluid dynamics, turbulence.

Numerical simulation becomes an essential part of the industrial and environmental design process. With the increasing computer power, the simulation of larger or more detailed systems is feasible. Methods which can be applied not only by experts are demanded. For instance, for the design process of an energy-saving car: start with the first design step by a CAD system and put the construction data in a black box, press a button and the output at which parts one has to optimize the shape of that car to reduce aerodynamic drag. And one step further, the program optimizes the shape by itself and sends the constructive data directly to the next level of design. This may be the future, but tools which promise good results for one or more steps are available now. How reliable are these in reality? Where are the crucial points in the simulations and which methods should be applied to get the best results? And where are the difficulties for High Performance Computing?

To get an understanding of the main issues of these problems for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), this article starts with an introduction of CFD, the basic equations and most used methods for solving incompressible flow problems. The next section concentrates on the most interesting field of flows, the turbulent flows and different ways to simulate turbulence. Then the common ways to handle flow problems are described with a special view on high performance computing.

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