XCFD: Progress Developing a Performance Portable RANS Flow Solver in HPCMP CREATE™-AV
Heterogeneous High-Performance Computing (HPC) architectures, which combine conventional multi-core CPUs with accelerators such as GPUs, currently dominate the broad supercomputing landscape. Accelerators provide access to thousands of compute cores per node, which dramatically increases the available compute resources for codes that can take advantage of them. The DoD HPCMP has begun incorporating more heterogeneous nodes in recent system acquisitions, and there is a strong desire from the HPCMP CREATE™-AV user community to leverage these new resources in multi-physics simulations. It is incumbent upon software developers to adapt their codes to make use of these heterogeneous architectures and meet the needs of their dedicated users.

Although heterogeneous architectures are becoming more prevalent, the majority of the DoD computing needs are currently met by conventional non-accelerated CPU-based resources from laptops to high-end workstations to conventional clusters. Due to the sheer size, complexity, and high inertia of developing and verifying a multi-physics code, it is desirable to maintain a single-source codebase that is readily parallel and portable across different architectures. Moreover, the code needs to be easily maintainable over time and across multiple platform generations. The impetus for a single-source codebase has prompted the development of performance portable applications that utilize libraries and abstraction layers to insulate developers from the changing architectures.

The CREATE-AV team is continuing the development of their next-generation performance portable flow solver called XCFD. This solver is designed upon the Mint library, which provides a mesh data model and a mesh-aware, fine-grain parallel execution model that enables the creation of computational kernels independent of the underlying hardware architecture. In this talk, we will discuss the current status of the development of a perfect gas finite volume RANS solver for XCFD and future development efforts for this platform including the long-term goal of reaching feature parity with the other flow solvers available within CREATE-AV's Kestrel and Helios products. Future features of interest include a real-gas reactive flow capability, 2-equation turbulence modeling, transition modeling, and near-body/off-body simulations.
IMPACT
Accomplishment: Development of a large-scale, performance-portable flow solver for use on heterogeneous HPC systems; Result: Improved computational speed resulting in reduced turn-around time for critical simulations.
PRESENTER
Holst, Kevin
kholst@utk.edu
901-270-5335
University of Tennessee
CO-AUTHOR(S)
Tyson, William
william.c.tyson12.civ@us.navy.mil
Zagaris, George
george.zagaris@us.af.mil
Lamberson, Steven
steven.e.lamberson2.ctr@mail.mil
CATEGORY
Comp Fluid Dynamics
SECONDARY CATEGORY
GPU usage for HPC
SYSTEM(S) USED
Narwhal, Nautilus, Blueback, Raider