[aerohead]

1) In 1989, the Department of Aerospace Engineering, at Princeton University published a simple metric for the computational requirement for solving the Navier-Stokes equations for all scales of turbulence.
2) The requirement = Reynolds number raised to the 9/4 power ( or an exponent = 2.25 ).
3) A swept wing example was assigned Rn = 1.0 X 10 ( to the eleventh power )
, or Rn-10,000,000.
4) 10,000,000 to the 2.25-power = 5-quadrillion, 623-trillion, 413-billion, 252-million calculations.
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* At the time, the most powerful supercomputer, the Cray XMP, was rated at 100-floating-point operations per second ( 100 Mflops ).
** If the Cray were used, a single iteration of the N-S would require 1-year, 9-months, and 11-days to compute.
*** The authors reported that, in order to solve the Navier-Stokes equations for all manner of turbulence, would require a computer 1,000-times as powerful as the Cray XMP.
**** If the Moore's Law relationship of a doubling of a computer's power each 18-months held, then it would be the year 2002-1/2 before a supercomputer would exist, which was capable of calculating an iteration within 48-hours ( which is presently a welcome attribute ).
***** In 2011, Chalmers University of Technology published that no computer existed which could solve the N-S equations for an automobile, due to it's enlarged flow domain, compared to an aircraft.
****** In 2014, Mercedes-Benz reported that they WERE solving 99% accurate CFD solutions within 48-hours of run time.
******* Presently, I've not run across any reporting of commercially-available CFD packages which can solve automotive designs within 99% accuracy of a full-scale wind tunnel test other than, the Dassault Exa Powerflow CFD, and SIEMEN's STAR CCM+ CFD software.
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Presently, the University of North Texas System ( across the street ) has gone in on the Lonestar6 supercomputer at UT Austin, which will be shared by five entities.
It's a $ 8.4-million system, by DELL / AMD ( both of Austin, Texas ), with a capacity of 3-petaFlops, 7th-fastest in the USA.
With 41-petabytes of usable storage.
It would solve the N-S equations in under 2-seconds.