Unstructured Grid Adaptation: Status, Potential Impacts, and Recommended Investments Towards CFD 2030

International audience; Unstructured grid adaptation is a powerful tool to control Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) discretization error. It has enabled key increases in the accuracy, automation, and capacity of some fluid simulation applications. Slotnick et al. provide a number of case studies in the CFD Vision 2030 Study: A Path to Revolutionary Computational Aerosciences to illustrate the current state of CFD capability and capacity. The study authors forecast the potential impact of emerging High Performance Computing (HPC) environments forecast in the year 2030 and identify that mesh generation and adaptivity will continue to be significant bottlenecks in the CFD workflow. These bottlenecks may persist because very little government investment has been targeted in these areas. To motivate investment, the impacts of improved grid adaptation technologies are identified. The CFD Vision 2030 Study roadmap and anticipated capabilities in complementary disciplines are quoted to provide context for the progress made in grid adaptation in the past fifteen years, current status, and a forecast for the next fifteen years with recommended investments. These investments are specific to mesh adaptation and impact other aspects of the CFD process. Finally, a strategy is identified to di↵use grid adaptation technology into production CFD work flows.