Periodic Reporting for period 1 - NextSim (CODA: Next generation of industrial aerodynamic simulation code)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2021-03-01 do 2022-08-31
Aviation contributes to more than 2% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and its activity is increasing exponentially. In the absence of further measures, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from international aviation are estimated to almost quadruple by 2050 compared to 20101. In the process of obtaining new and more efficient products, numerical simulation (such as Computational Fluid Dynamics, CFD) is becoming a key player in aeronautical design. However, in despite of the current deployment CFD during the design process, NextSim partners, recognise that there is a need to increase the capabilities of current numerical simulation tools for aeronautical design by re-engineering them for extreme-scale parallel computing platforms. By doing so, the aerospace industry will be able to expand the use of HPC (High-Performance Computing) in the design loop. NextSim aims at improving industrial applicability of CFD software, in particular CODA, on leading-edge HPC systems. The CODA solver includes classic finite volume capabilities and new highly accurate high order discontinuous Galerkin schemes, all specifically tailored for aeronautical applications, and available to all partners. The CODA solver will be the new reference solver for aerodynamic applications inside AIRBUS group (including aircraft and helicopters), as such, it will be used by AIRBUS for the design of a variety of engineering applications, having a significant impact in the aeronautical market. This targets the efficient implementation on modern HPC hardware as well as extended functionalities making use of the available HPC resources, in particular turbulence scale-resolving simulation capabilities which would not be viable without the extensive computational resources offered by massively parallel HPC cluster environments. NextSim specifically aims at both algorithmic/numerical improvements and HPC aspects of their implementation at the same time, which can be conflicting goals in some cases.
In the first 18 months of NextSim, the teams for each WP have been stablished, and interesting first results have been obtained. Some of the advances for WP1 are the early selection and definition of common test cases that are complex enough to provide reasonable information on actual industrial application performance and being able to provide settings (parameters) and updated software versions along with a quantifiable assessment of the performance from one beneficiary to another one. In the case of WP2, significant progress has been made in the implementation of turbulence models in CODA that will help performing scale-resolving simulation of aeronautical flows, and new algebraic solvers developed in NextSim showed very promising results and allowed to obtain significant gains (as low as 20% and up to several times faster) with respect to the reference usual solvers in CODA. For the WP3, NextSim partners are investigating and developing several feature detection techniques in a way that will allow them to become regular tools in the analysis of fluid flows. Regarding the WP4, first results and conclusions have already impacted the development of CODA. This includes the development of performance models for the relevant kernels, performance analysis of the baseline CODA version in NextSim, improvements on the relevant kernels in current generation architectures, development of mini apps to assess the capabilities of CODA limiting kernels on novel EuroHPC architectures and development of novel load balancing algorithms. Finally, regarding WP5, dissemination activities have been initially carried out with the development of the website and the creation of the social media accounts, while exploitation and impact assessment are planned by the end of the project.
To conclude, no major issues arose during this initial part of the project, in the second phase of the project, we expect to fulfill the planed activities, and therefore, increase the capabilities of current aerodynamical numerical simulation tools for extreme-scale parallel computing platforms. This is particularly important and revolutionary for aircrafts, where more simulation and less testing will have strong impact in the process chain "from design the prototype to mass production”.