HPC for Energy

Project Information

HPC4E

Grant agreement ID: 689772

DOI

10.3030/689772

Project closed

EC signature date 10 November 2015

Start date 1 December 2015

End date 30 November 2017

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 1 998 176,25

EU contribution

€ 1 998 176,25

Coordinated by

BARCELONA SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER CENTRO NACIONAL DE SUPERCOMPUTACION
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - HPC4E (HPC for Energy)

Reporting period: 2016-12-01 to 2017-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

HPC4E is appling the new exascale HPC techniques to energy industry simulations, customizing them, and going beyond the state-of-the-art in the required HPC exascale simulations for different energy sources: wind energy production and design, efficient combustion systems for biomass-derived fuels (biogas), and exploration geophysics for hydrocarbon reservoirs.
For wind energy industry HPC is a must. The competitiveness of wind farms can be guaranteed only with accurate wind resource assessment, farm design and short-term micro-scale wind simulations to forecast the daily power production. The use of CFD LES models to analyse atmospheric flow in a wind farm capturing turbine wakes and array effects requires exascale HPC systems.
Biogas, i.e. biomass-derived fuels by anaerobic digestion of organic wastes, is attractive because of its wide availability, renewability and reduction of CO2 emissions, contribution to diversification of energy supply, rural development, and it does not compete with feed and food feedstock. However, its use in practical systems is still limited since the complex fuel composition might lead to unpredictable combustion performance and instabilities in industrial combustors. The next generation of exascale HPC systems will be able to run combustion simulations in parameter regimes relevant to industrial applications using alternative fuels, which is required to design efficient furnaces, engines, clean burning vehicles and power plants.

One of the main HPC consumers is the oil & gas (O&G) industry. The computational requirements arising from full wave-form modelling and inversion of seismic and electromagnetic data is ensuring that the O&G industry will be an early adopter of exascale computing technologies. By taking into account the complete physics of waves in the subsurface, imaging tools are able to reveal information about the Earth’s interior with unprecedented quality.

HPC4E project has three general objectives, what we are working, and a large list of specific technical objectives related with research in each technology:
1. Develop beyond-the-state-of-the-art high performance simulation tools that can help the energy industry to respond future energy demands and also to carbon-related environmental issues using the state-of-the-art HPC systems.
The project is successfully advancing in the deployment of complete simulation environments with a high scalability and industrial use.
2. Improve the cooperation between energy industries from EU and Brazil.
The industrial partners of the project are successfully involved in the use of the technology generated in the project.
3. Improve the cooperation between the leading research centers in EU and Brazil in HPC.
The sharing use of supercomputing infrastructures between Brazil and EU has been started. This includes the main production computers (MareNostrum in Europe, Santos Dumont and Lobo Carneiro in Brazil), some exascale prototypes like Mont-Blanc or Deep and platforms as PlaFRIM.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

HPC4E project had three general objectives and a large list of specific technical objectives related with research in each technology.

Below we summarize the achievements in each of the general objectives we planned at the beginning of the project:
1. Several optimizations have been made in existing simulation tools, new numerical methods, well-suited to exascale machines have been developed and tested and several industrial cases in wind, biofuels and oil and gas applications have been solved in state-of-the-art HPC systems and exascale prototypes in Europe and Brazil.
2. Several innovations and developments have been incorporated in production codes at REPSOL, TOTAL and PETROBRAS. New simulation technologies were proved beneficial for Iberdrola (Spain) and ONS (Brazil).
3.The project has Improved the cooperation between the leading research centers in EU and Brazil in HPC. The shared use of supercomputing infrastructures between Brazil and EU successfully continued. This includes the main production computers (MareNostrum in Europe, Santos Dumont and Lobo Carneiro in Brazil) and some exascale prototypes like Mont-Blanc or DEEP and platforms as PlaFRIM. The number of CPU hours used in the project is in Section 1.4.

Over the two years of project, the consortium published a total of 96 scientific publications, and participated in a total of 60 conferences, workshops or seminars disseminating the project. The consortium also organized a total of 2 workshops. It also started and strengthened collaborations with other EU projects, such as NEWA, GEAGAM, Mont-Blanc, DEEP-ER, PRACE and the Centres of Excellence POP and EoCoE. With the aim of building a community around the project, the dissemination team has made every effort to post regular updates on the project’s dedicated LinkedIn channels.

In terms of exploitation, the dissemination and exploitation team has identified the exploitable results of the project and performed initial market analyses. The project results provide a deeper understanding of new algorithms and procedures for the future exascale machines, allowing high fidelity simulations. Better simulations impact directly the knowledge of processes related to wind energy, biofuels and oil & gas.

The exploitation of the results of the HPC4E project is at three levels:
1. Industry: The industrial partners of the project (Total, Repsol, Iberdrola and Petrobras) have had direct access to the innovative ideas and tools of the project and have applied them to their internal software.
2. Scientific community: the outcomes of the research are published in peer-reviewed high impact journals, disseminated in congresses and conferences, and transferred to other European and Brazilian projects related to energy.
3. Society: HPC4E is a project directly related to obtaining and managing more efficiently energetic resources by means of high performance computing. In the long run, this will result in cheaper, cleaner and safer energy production, what has a direct impact on society.
The partners of the consortium have developed and used several in-house software, which collect the innovations generated in this project. Initial market analyses show potential for a commercial exploitation of the application software.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

HPC4E is improving the science at:
1) A new algorithm scheme for high order finite diference stencils on GPUs
2) A new type of high order finite difference for free surface boundary condition on elastic forward modeling
3) A detailed scheme for biogas oxidation
4) A synthetic benchmarch for exascale comparison of FWI codes
5) A new downscaling strategy to connect mesoscale wind data with atmospheric CFD at microscale

The general impacts derived from the efficient use of exascale HPC andsimulation technology are:
• Vast improvement in simulation efficiency in terms of Watts needed per execution and reduced time-to-solution. This will be applied to critical aspects of the energy value chain, with rapid deployment in the partner’ current production systems.
• Establishing transnational “numerical laboratories”, which are cheaper, safer and faster than real-life experiments.
As well, derived from the collaboration between EU-Brazil, we are reinforcing the ties between EU and Brazil in critical aspects for society such as energy.

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