Congratulations to PRISM Academics on their Recent Grant Award Success!
Congratulations to the following members of staff on their recent grant award successes:
EPSRC:
Gen X: ExCALIBUR working group on Exascale continuum mechanics through code generation
Congratulations to Dr D Ham, Prof P Kelly, Dr PE Farrell, Dr PE Vincent, Dr G Gorman for their roles in securing funding which aims to establish the requirements for exascale simulation software for continuum mechanics, and to provide a concrete way of achieving this capability within the next five years. The Gen X project approach is to move beyond just writing code to a system of specialist simulation languages which enable scientists and engineers to specify the problem they want to solve and the algorithms they want by writing mathematics, the language of science. The actual code will be automatically generated by specialist compilers rather than hand-written. Rather than an algorithm developer writing a paper about their new development and hoping that simulation scientists will find the time to code it up for their specific problem, the algorithm will be encoded in a domain specific language and implemented in its compiler. The simulation scientist will then be able to access the algorithm directly without recoding. At exascale, writing all the simulation outputs to disk for later analysis is impossible. Instead, simulation data must be processed, analysed and visualised as the simulation is conducted, and only the results stored for later use. Gen X will provide mathematical languages for this process which will enable the scientist or engineer to concisely specify the analysis to be performed, and to have confidence that the resulting calculations will be both efficient and correct. By enabling scientists and engineers to work at a higher mathematical level while also accessing more sophisticated algorithms and hardware-specific implementations than previously possible, Gen X will make simulation science both more capable and more productive. In this manner, Gen X is essential to realising the potential of exascale computing while also making the most efficient use of research resources.
ELEMENT – Exascale Mesh Network
Congratulations to Prof SJ Sherwin, Dr J Peiro, Dr DC Moxey for their roles in winning a grant to addresses the high priority use case of meshing for the Exascale (i.e. ensuring that meshes are of sufficient quality to represent Exascale problems and can be partitioned efficiently to minimise load imbalance) as well as meshing at the Exascale (i.e. creating highly scalable solutions that will be able to exploit extreme levels of parallelism). The meshes required for Exascale simulations, under which we will aim to model problems with extreme geometric complexity and levels of refinement, will necessarily be very large with 10^9 cells and above, and contain cells that may differ in size by many orders of magnitude to faithfully resolve the underlying physics at their appropriate scales. Meshing and geometry management remain a significant bottleneck for complex applications on HPC platforms, posing a challenging obstacle that must be overcome to enable Exascale simulations. From a technical perspective, these issues include (but are not limited to) improved geometric handling, mesh adaptation and optimisation, intelligent meshing, automation and robustness, all within a large distributed environment that lies outside of our current capabilities. ELEMENT’s objectives are threefold: building a community around meshing practice by establishing a collaborative network; undertaking proof of concept studies, with prototype implementations of two target challenges; and publishing a Vision Paper and strategic research agenda covering the full meshing workflow, from mesh generation to adaptation, partitioning and visualisation.