EXCELLERAT Supports Advanced CFD Training at BSC

This year’s CECAM School called “Advanced CFD and Turbulence Modelling targeting HPC” partnered with the EuroHPC EXCELLERAT P2 project to offer training to a group of 17 people coming mainly from Universities and Research Centres. Running from October 20-22, 2026 at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain, three main lectures were given by Guillaume Houzeaux (BSC, SP), Wei Wang (STFC, UK) and Yvan Fournier (EDF, FR), on solver coupling, turbulence and conjugate heat transfer, and GPU implementation, respectively.

The software used for demonstration was the open-source CFD multi-physics software, code_saturne, which is mainly developed by the EDF company. The two main tutorials consisted of the simulation of two complex engineering problems that ran overnight on the BSC MareNostrum5 supercomputer, the former dealing with the heat transfer coupling between fluid and solid for the flow in a tube bundle, and the latter with the transient swirling flow in a pump. Both simulations ran for about 10-11 hours on 1 CPU node (112 CPU cores).

Analyses of the results were carried out the day after the simulations ran, and focus was put on the in-situ visualisation feature of code_saturne. Attendees also explored parallel performance optimisation using MPI+OpenMP and MPI+OpenMP+GPU hybrid models to discover the optimal configuration for minimising time-to-solution. Two social events were organised, thanks to the CECAM grant. The organisers of the School would like to thank Sophia Honisch (HLRS), Maria Paz Baghetti (BSC) and Georgia Lomas/Joanne Ogden (STFC) for their great help on the administration side, as well as the system admin teams of the STFC ADA platform and BSC MareNostrum5 supercomputer.