Efficient FE2 multi-scale implementation applied to composite deformation

I am grateful to have visited STFC's Daresbury Laboratory in the UK over the first three weeks of December 2019 as part of the HPC-Europa3 programme. During the visit, I was a PhD student doing my research at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and the Polytechnique University of Catalunya (UPC). My work was focused on implementing an HPC application for solving industrial composite material problems using a technique called the FE2 multi-scale method. The computational application was offloaded to GPUs using OpenACC in previous works with the STFC thanks to Judicaël Grasset and Charles Moulinec.

The objective of this three-week project was to test the application in different CPU/GPU-based machines, some provided by the HPC-Europa3 programme and others by the host research centre and BSC: Wilkes-2, Cirrus, and CTE-POWER at BSC. We also moved forward with the implementation and offloaded part of the algorithm with CUDA. This last part was completed two weeks after the visit and achieved 50% performance over the previous OpenACC implementation (device: GPU NVIDIA V100).

I had visited STFC previously in April 2019 and hosted Judicaël Grasset from STFC at the BSC in July 2019 as part of the project porting the application to GPUs using OpenACC. It was a pleasure having these opportunities to work with the STFC researchers. I have always received exciting and breakthrough ideas from these people. We were able to present a poster at Supercomputing 2019 at Denver about this topic, and this was probably our best achievement. I admire the seriousness of these people and the efficient way they handle complex problems. Daresbury and the people who work there have positively changed my way of thinking and have taught me a lot of techniques for my career.

Daresbury is a beautiful place, maybe a bit cold for people like me who have lived a lot in Argentina or Spain but a good experience. It is located between the cities of Liverpool and Manchester, making it an excellent base for visiting them. During my visits I stayed in Warrington, a city near Daresbury, which is also very nice and quiet. I had the opportunity to visit Liverpool and Manchester on several weekends. I especially love The Beatles, and I had time to visit Penny Lane where some of the band's members grew up. I also had the opportunity to visit the rebuilt Cavern Club where The Beatles started playing. Now a lot of bands and musicians go to play. I can spend hours there enjoying that music, and that's why I strongly recommend going!

I want to acknowledge the HPC-Europa3 programme for funding my visit to STFC, Daresbury Laboratory, and all the help and attention about transport and accommodation received before, during, and after the visit. It's important to note how serious and considerate they are about ensuring that researchers have a good and efficient experience in the host research centre.

HPC-Europa3 website: www.hpc-europa.eu

Next call closes on 14 May 2020.