Arnau Miro: an HPC-Europa visitor's report

Hello everyone! My name is Arnau Miró and I am a third-year PhD student from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. I’m working in the Aerospace department in collaboration with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center Computer Applications in Science and Engineering department. I visited EPCC under the HPC-Europa3transnational access programme, although I was mainly hosted by Dr Charles Moulinec at STFC Daresbury Laboratory.

My research involves large-scale fluid flow simulations of synthetic jet actuators, which are very interesting devices with lots of potential applications in the aerospace field. Since I need large computational meshes to carry out my simulations, I have to use supercomputers like ARCHER. During my time in Daresbury, I worked on an algorithm to multiply meshes in parallel on the supercomputer that is implemented inside Code_Saturne, an open-source CFD solver developed by EDF.

Then, I applied the mesh multiplication algorithm to generate a large mesh and compute the fluid flow of a circular synthetic jet actuator.

I’m very excited because I’m presenting the results of this work at the ICCFD10 conference that will be held in Barcelona this summer.

Besides working hard, as a nature and photography lover I couldn’t miss the chance to explore the awesome countryside of the UK. I visited the beautiful city of Chester, walking by the old city walls. I went to the top of Conwy castle, which has amazing views of the whole city, and I was mesmerised by Lake Windermere in the Lake District National Park.

Overall, it was a highly positive experience for me and I would strongly recommend to anyone without hesitation. Although I stayed mostly in Daresbury, I visited EPCC for some days, which gave me the opportunity to get acquainted to the people working there and my supervisor. The only thing I regret is not having enough time to visit Edinburgh and Scotland properly. I’m saving this for next time!