An open-source software framework for exascale-capable flow simulations on dynamically adaptive grids and its application in Earth System Modelling.
The aim of the ADAPTEX project is to develop a generally usable open-source software framework for exascale-capable flow simulations on dynamic adaptive grids and its application in Earth System Modelling (ESM). By merging existing, individually specialised high-perfomance computing software libraries and extending them to heterogeneous exascale computer architectures, the parallel scalability of current and future CFD applications will be significantly improved, the modelled spatial resolution and accuracy increased, and overall resource efficiency improved.
The developed technologies will be directly applied in a commercial flood simulation code, global climate chemistry simulations and atmospheric Lagrangian transport simulations, and a shallow water simulation tool for surface runoff. The combined performance will be demonstrated on Tier-0 high-performance computers.
Adaptive grids in a simulation of currents in the Earth's atmosphere.
Targeted refinement and coarsening of the computing cells can significantly reduce computing time and memory requirements.
The department of High-Performance Computing of the DLR Institute of Software Technology is in charge of both project management and technical development. The department has been researching scalable methods of dynamic adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) for several years. The use of AMR allows the resolution of a simulation to be refined and coarsened in a targeted manner. This optimises the use of computing power and memory consumption, so that simulations are possible in significantly finer resolutions than with conventional static grids.
In ADAPTEX, the Institute of Software Technology is further developing the dynamic adaptive grid management software t8code, together with state-of-the-art discontinuous Galerkin methods from the University of Cologne and adaptation estimators from RWTH Aachen University. In the project, several scientific and industrial application codes are connected and their performance - especially on supercomputers - is increased. The DLR Institute for Atmospheric Physics is contributing application codes for the field of atmospheric chemistry, the Forschungszentrum Jülich for atmospheric transport and Hydrotec GmbH for flood simulations.
