Exascale framework for supporting high-fidelity simulations of multiphase reacting flows in complex geometries

Descripción del proyecto

Eficiencia energética mediante simulaciones a exaescala

El desarrollo tecnológico ya tiene la vista puesta en la computación a exaescala, la cual acelerará la velocidad de procesamiento hasta los trillones de cálculos por segundo (diez elevado a la decimoctava potencia). Estos cálculos numéricos matemáticos darán lugar a simulaciones más representativas de los procesos a gran escala y generarán aplicaciones revolucionarias. El proyecto Exa-FireFlows trata sobre estos progresos, y en concreto los dedicados a la combustión de combustibles fósiles y los flujos reactivos involucrados. Se calcula que los combustibles fósiles seguirán siendo durante los próximos cincuenta años la principal alimentación del transporte y la electricidad, y el empleo de modelos avanzados para simular los flujos reactivos influirá enormemente en la eficiencia de los combustibles, reducirá la contaminación y dará paso a combustibles eficientes alternativos.

Objetivo

High performance computing (HPC) has transformed scientific research across numerous disciplines by supporting theory and experiments with numerical simulations. Exascale computing is the next milestone in HPC and is called to play an important role in economic competitiveness, societal challenges and science leadership. Combustion is one of the fields with high strategic importance and potential to fully exploit the future exascale systems. Nowadays, combustion of fossil fuels is the main power source, and some projections indicate that the combustion of liquid fuels will still dominate transportation and power generation industries for the next 50 years. Further understanding of the physics and chemistry of the combustion process is fundamental to achieve improvements in fuel efficiency, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and pollutants, while transitioning to alternative fuels and greener technologies. The use of advanced numerical simulations has enabled to make important contributions for increasing cycle efficiency, reduction of pollutant emissions, and use of alternative fuels in practical applications. The exascale computing will enable the development of high-fidelity turbulent combustion simulations that could not be analyzed before because it was too computationally expensive. However, the implementation of the new and future supercomputers require the evolution of multiple and different technologies in a coherent and complimentary way, including hardware, software, and application algorithms. Scientific codes and formulations need to be re-designed and adapted in order to exploit the different levels of parallelism and complex memory hierarchies of the new and future heterogeneous systems. The goal of the project is to explore and develop novel co-execution, memory awareness and communication avoidance strategies into a framework that allows the simulation of advance high-fidelity multiphase reacting flows in complex geometries using unstructured grids.