TY - JOUR
T1 - Modernization and optimization of a legacy open-source CFD code for high-performance computing architectures
AU - Gel, Aytekin
AU - Hu, Jonathan
AU - Ould-Ahmed-Vall, El Moustapha
AU - Kalinkin, Alexander A.
N1 - Funding Information:
Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory managed and operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration [grant number DE-AC04-94AL85000].
Publisher Copyright:
©, This material is published by permission of the Sandia National Laboratories for the US Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC04-94AL85000.
PY - 2017/2/7
Y1 - 2017/2/7
N2 - Legacy codes remain a crucial element of today's simulation-based engineering ecosystem due to the extensive validation process and investment in such software. The rapid evolution of high-performance computing architectures necessitates the modernization of these codes. One approach to modernization is a complete overhaul of the code. However, this could require extensive investments, such as rewriting in modern languages, new data constructs, etc., which will necessitate systematic verification and validation to re-establish the credibility of the computational models. The current study advocates using a more incremental approach and is a culmination of several modernization efforts of the legacy code MFIX, which is an open-source computational fluid dynamics code that has evolved over several decades, widely used in multiphase flows and still being developed by the National Energy Technology Laboratory. Two different modernization approaches,‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’, are illustrated. Preliminary results show up to 8.5x improvement at the selected kernel level with the first approach, and up to 50% improvement in total simulated time with the latter were achieved for the demonstration cases and target HPC systems employed.
AB - Legacy codes remain a crucial element of today's simulation-based engineering ecosystem due to the extensive validation process and investment in such software. The rapid evolution of high-performance computing architectures necessitates the modernization of these codes. One approach to modernization is a complete overhaul of the code. However, this could require extensive investments, such as rewriting in modern languages, new data constructs, etc., which will necessitate systematic verification and validation to re-establish the credibility of the computational models. The current study advocates using a more incremental approach and is a culmination of several modernization efforts of the legacy code MFIX, which is an open-source computational fluid dynamics code that has evolved over several decades, widely used in multiphase flows and still being developed by the National Energy Technology Laboratory. Two different modernization approaches,‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’, are illustrated. Preliminary results show up to 8.5x improvement at the selected kernel level with the first approach, and up to 50% improvement in total simulated time with the latter were achieved for the demonstration cases and target HPC systems employed.
KW - Computational fluid dynamics (CFD)
KW - MFIX
KW - Trilinos project
KW - Xeon Phi
KW - code modernization
KW - code refactoring
KW - high-performance computing
KW - legacy software
KW - many cores
KW - reacting multiphase flow simulations
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U2 - 10.1080/10618562.2017.1285398
DO - 10.1080/10618562.2017.1285398
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85015801874
SN - 1061-8562
VL - 31
SP - 122
EP - 133
JO - International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics
JF - International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics
IS - 2
ER -