Blog

One of EXCELLERAT’s tasks is improving Nek5000’s Exascale readiness, particularly for accelerators. We used an OpenACC version of the proxy-app Nekbone and focused on further optimising the small matrix-matrix kernels which constitutes most of the work in the full Nek5000. Tuning the TOpenACC directives improved performance of these kernels by almost a factor of two.

We are pleased to announce EXCELLERAT’s redesigned Service Portal launch. It presents a wide variety of resources in an easily-accessible format and will play an essential role in EXCELLERAT’s mission to create a Centre of Excellence in Engineering. The user-centric Portal offers separate dashboards tailored towards engineers, software developers, and the general engineering community.

We can affirm with certainty that future Exascale systems will be heterogeneous, including accelerators such as GPUs. We can also expect higher variability on the performance of the various computing devices engaged in a simulation. In this context, dynamic load balancing (DLB) becomes a must for the parallel efficiency of any simulation code.

Due to the corona virus travel restrictions, we have successfully organised our first EXCELLERAT virtual All Hands Meeting with more than 40 participants. Instead of hosting it in Stockholm from 5th until 7th May, this was our team’s largest online conference. We discussed the current status of all work packages and use cases.

In addition to enabling academic research, the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) supports industry by making its supercomputing resources available for research and development. To better understand and address the specific needs of industrial HPC users, SICOS BW and HLRS hosted the third annual Industrial HPC User Roundtable (iHURT) on December 3, 2019.

In November 2019 CINECA hosted the successful EXCELLERAT Team meeting in Bologna. The purpose was to show the current success stories of all partners and to discuss how to push the use cases in the direction of exascale. First demos looked really impressive. It has been productive and a real pleasure.

Understanding the complex physics of wall-bounded turbulent flows is of utmost importance, considering the presence of this type of flow in various engineering applications. Thus, using high-fidelity approaches such as DNS (Direct Numerical Simulation) and LES (Large Eddy Simulation) has proven advantageous. However, these approaches have at least two main challenges to deal with.

On June 11th, 2019, a Norwegian hydrogen refuelling station exploded. The whole hydrogen refueling station network had to be shut down. Toyota and Hyundai are both halting fuel cell sales in Norway. As transportation companies struggle to find the way out of fossil fuels, this event illustrates how safety aspects can become a brutal showstopper.

Designing the car of the future requires going over the usual RANS approach, since it fails to predict features like transitional flows, instabilities, noise generation, and combustion efficiency with acceptable prediction accuracy. This in turn requires exascale systems to sustain more high-fidelity simulation techniques like LES or DES. EXCELLERAT paves the way to this transition.