The European Centre of Excellence for Engineering Applications
Author: Mark Sawyer
Posted: 2 Dec 2019 | 10:36
The European Centre of Excellence for Engineering Applications (EXCELLERAT) has spent its first year identifying the major challenges that must be overcome to reach Exascale performance for a set of reference applications.
There are great opportunities for engineering applications in exploiting exascale computing (that is, more than 1018 operations per second). This will be the case not only in academia but also industry: engineering is seen as having the biggest potential for exascale in the industrial field. EXCELLERAT brings together expertise in HPC and engineering software to support the development of applications that can exploit computing capability at this level.
In addition to developing and optimising the reference applications, EXCELLERAT will be looking at generic HPC tools and technologies. Many of the planned developments are in typical HPC technologies (for example in the areas of new solver and numerical methods, and new mesh generation and adaptation techniques). In addition the Centre is looking at data management tools and how to adapt applications to work effectively on emerging computing architectures.
EXCELLERAT will shortly launch its first set of services to the engineering software community that will support developers and users on the road to exascale and beyond.
Community building
Outreach is an important activity of the Centre. Training activities are planned to enable users and developers to work more productively with HPC. We are also setting up an industry forum to allow a two-way exchange with end-users so that we can meet the objective of improving European competitiveness.
Image above shows a Large Eddy Simulation in a venting chamber of an explosion using the AVBP solver (see Vermorel, O. et al (2017), Combustion and Flame, 183 (September), pp. 207-223). Image courtesy CERFACS.
Author
Mark Sawyer, EPCC