A successful model of high Reynolds number cavity flows involves reproducing the flow physics with adequate accuracy, given the available computational resources. The process of planning high Reynolds number cavity flow simulations is systematically reviewed to extract the dependence of different programmer's choice on the CFD mesh size and on the cost of the computation. This process has been broken down into five phases: i) description of the problem in the continuous domain, ii) problem

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... reduction by turbulence modelling, iii) discretization in space and time, iv) integration of the governing equations, v) costing the numerical op- erations of the flow solver. This paper examines the influence of each phase on the spectral width and the grid density which are the key CFD indicators that determine the cost of the computation. A dimensional analysis was conducted to separate the effects of the geometry of the enclosure, the boundary layer resolution, the turbulence model and the numerical scheme order of accuracy. Regression analysis on the non-dimensional groups of published cavity CFD simulations determined the range of practical values used by current state-of-the-art computations. This analysis is a useful tool to obtain design trade-offs by a multivariate optimization in cavity flow CFD and for estimating the order of magnitude of computational resources required by the simulations.