This sample demonstrates the situation, when geometry of the problem (geometry of the aircraft) is rather complicated, while physics of the problems is rather simple.
This picture shows the distribution of pressure on the surface of a typical military aircraft. The freestream Mach number is 1.8, the angle of attack is 80. Control surfaces at the trailing edge of the delta wing are defected upwards 100.
This sample is given from the book on CFD dated to 1990. The calculations were done in 1986 (i.e. they are more that 30-years old).
Approximately 19,000 grid points were required in each cross-section plane at each downstream location. The flow was assumed inviscid and everywhere supersonic so that an explicit marching scheme in the freestream direction can be employed.
The calculations required 15 minutes on a CRAY-1 – the most powerful supercomputer of that time.
In spite of using very powerful computers, such calculations are significantly less expensive than using real experiments in aerodynamic pipe, and they allow to obtain more data for different variants of the model.