IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center has joined a new project that supports the development of European exascale systems. The SCALABLE project will drive innovation in European industries and support basic research through advanced methods of computational fluid dynamics.
The SCALABLE project brings together major industrial and academic partners to improve the performance, scalability, and energy efficiency of industrial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software based on the Lattice-Boltzmann Method (LBM), which is today considered a reliable alternative to conventional CFD approaches. In general, LBM is suitable for the use of advanced supercomputer architectures as it allows massive parallelization.
The SCALABLE project aims to use two existing CFD tools; the software waLBerla and ProLB/LaBS. The waLBerla tool, which is aimed at the general research community and has high performance and near- perfect scalability, has already been able to solve problems larger than a trillion computational cells on petascale systems. WaLBerla achieves high performance through its unique ability to automatically generate highly optimized computational code. However, due to the lack of tools for working with real geometries and poor user-friendliness for non-expert HPC users, WaLBerla is not suitable for everyday industrial use. In contrast, the ProLB/LaBS CFD software already has the potential for industrial applications at a demonstrably high level. However, its performance needs to be improved. "The SCALABLE project will transfer high-performance methods from waLBerla to ProLB/LaBS, breaking down the barriers between academic and industrial applications. By improving the efficiency and scalability of the ProLB/LaBS software and deploying it on future European exascale systems, the project will have a direct impact on European industry while contributing to basic research," explains Lubomír Říha from the Infrastructure Research Laboratory, who is the Principal Investigator of the project at IT4Innovations at VSB - Technical University of Ostrava.
Funded by the EU's Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation with a total of EUR 3 million, the SCALABLE project started on 1st January 2021 and will run for three years under the auspices of the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU). The SCALABLE project brings together the following eight partners at the heart of the excellence of the European HPC ecosystem: the main coordinator is CS Group-France, and the project involves major European industrial players such as Renault and Airbus, as well as CERFACS, IT4Innovations at VSB-TUO, Jülich Supercomputing Center, Neovia Innovation, and the University of Erlangen.
This project received funding from the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No 956000. The Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme and from France, Germany, and the Czech Republic.