EXCELLERAT: new European Centre of Excellence for engineering applications

Engineering applications will be among the first to exploit Exascale computing (more than 1018 operations per second). This will be the case not only in academia but also industry, with engineering judged to have the biggest potential for Exascale in the industrial field. EXCELLERAT will bring together expertise in high performance computing and engineering software to support the development of applications capable of exploiting Exascale computing.

At the core of the project are six reference engineering software applications covering aerospace, marine engineering, renewable energy and automotive engineering. They were chosen to be representative of the types of application that could be run on Exascale computers, and each comes with one or more use cases that represents a real-world problem. These applications will provide requirements for technological developments (for example in the areas of new solver and numerical methods, and new mesh generation and adaptation techniques). The Centre will develop services based on the know-how developed in the project that can be offered to the wider engineering community. The long-term objective is to create a sustainable centre that will support developers and users on the road to Exascale (and beyond).

An important aspect of the work will be to take account of developments in new hardware and systems. EXCELLERAT will provide its users with access to the newest technologies and thus prepare engineering applications for further evolution on a base of state-of-the-art hardware. The Centre also aims to provide access to future technology prototypes to foster the uptake of new technologies and to explore usability for certain problem spaces. This will be part of the co-design approach of EXCELLERAT.

Exascale computing is without doubt a massive opportunity for the engineering community. EXCELLERAT will help that community overcome the challenges that go hand-in-hand with the opportunities, and ultimately lead to great rewards.

The Centre formally launched in December 2018, funded by the European Commission under Horizon 2020.