Price and Performance of Simulating Wind Instruments

A performance-price ratio of 2.2 Gflops per million dollars is demonstrated in simulations of wind instruments using a cluster of 20 non-dedicated Hewlett-Packard workstations and a shared-bus Ethernet network (the performance-price ratio is calculated assuming that the workstations were dedicated). The present simulations of wind instruments are based on the compressible Navier Stokes equations, and have only recently become possible through the use of parallel computing and through developments in numerical methods. The distributed simulation system has been built directly on top of UNIX and TCP/IP, and includes automatic process migration from busy workstations to free workstations.