Context
In SCALABLE, eminent industrials and academic partners will team up to achieve the scaling to unprecedented performance, scalability, and energy efficiency of an industrial LBM-based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software.
Over the last 10 years, Lattice Boltzmann methods (LBM) have evolved to become trustworthy alternatives to conventional CFD. LBM methods are also flexible so that they can be extended to handle complex, dynamically changing geometries, multiphase flows, and wide range of other multiphysics applications that are of high industrial relevance.
In the context of EuroHPC, the distinguishing critical feature of the LBM is the algorithmic locality stemming from an explicit time step. This makes the LBM especially well-suited to exploit advanced supercomputer architectures.
WaLBerla performance excels because of its uncompromising unique, architecture-specific automatic generation of optimized compute kernels, together with carefully designed parallel data structures. waLBerla, however, is not compliant with industrial applications.
On the other hand, the industrial CFD software LaBS already has such industrial capabilities at a proven high level of maturity, but it still has performance worthy of improvement. Therefore, SCALABLE will transfer the leading-edge performance technology from waLBerla to LaBS. The collaboration will deliver improved efficiency and scalability for LaBS to be prepared for the upcoming European Exascale systems.
The project outcomes will be disseminated through the LaBS software and will directly benefit to the European industry. Additionally, SCALABLE will also contribute to fundamental research. This will include energy efficient computing, GPU accelerated kernels, and a novel memory efficient sparse data structure available as open-source software within the waLBerla framework.
Objectives
The primary goal of SCALABLE is to develop an industrial LBM-based CFD solver capable to exploit current and future extreme scale architectures, expanding current capabilities of existing industrial LBM solvers by at least two orders of magnitude in terms of processor cores and in terms of lattice cells.
The ultimate goal is then to fundamentally enhance the predictive capabilities of industrial CFD software by making it usable on pre-exascale supercomputers for industrial class of applications.
