Towards Compute and Data Intensive Turbulent Combustion Simulation at the Exascale
Jackie Chen - Sandia National Laboratories, USA
(Chair: Jack Dongarra)

Abstract : Exascale computing will enable combustion simulations in parameter regimes relevant to next-generation combustion devices burning alternative fuels. High fidelity combustion simulations are needed to provide the underlying science base required to develop vastly more accurate predictive combustion models used ultimately to design fuel efficient, clean burning vehicles, planes, and power plants for electricity generation. However, making the transition to exascale poses a number of algorithmic, software and technological challenges due to power constraints and the massive concurrency expected at the exascale. Addressing issues of data movement, power consumption, memory capacity, interconnection bandwidth, programmability, and scaling through combustion co-design are critical to ensure that future combustion simulations can take advantage of emerging computer architectures in the 2023 timeframe. Co-design refers to a computer system design process where combustion science requirements influence architecture design and constraints inform the formulation and design of algorithms and software. The current state of petascale turbulent combustion simulation will be reviewed followed by a discussion of co-design topics investigated by the exascale combustion co-design center, ExaCT (http://www.exactcodesign.org): 1) asynchronous numerical methods for partial differential equations; 2) asynchronous programming and execution models for multi-core hybrid architectures, and 3) in situ data analytics and adjoint sensitivity analysis. Results from a recent refactorization of a combustion direct numerical simulation (DNS) code, S3D, using an asynchronous model, Legion, with dynamic runtime analysis performed at scale on a petascale leadership class hybrid architecture will be presented. Further, using Legion, the extensibility of incorporating in situ analytics is demonstrated.

http://crf.sandia.gov/combustion-research-facility/working-with-the-crf/crf-staff-2/jacqueline-chen/