Come visit us at the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking booth at ISC! We will be there all week to answer your questions about our goals, future work, and its potential impact on the field of computational fluid dynamics. Once again in Hamburg, the annual ISC event is sure to offer something for every person interested in HPC, machine learning, data analytics, and quantum computing.
In this talk, Roman Iakymchuk presents his work on accuracy and reproducibility assuring strategies for parallel iterative solvers that may not hold due to the non-associativity of floating-point operations. These strategies primarily rely on guarding every bit of result until final rounding, hence they can be costly. The energy consumption constraint for large-scale computing encourages scientists to revise the architecture design of hardware but also applications, algorithms, as well as the underlying working/ storage precision. The main aim is to make the computing cost sustainable and apply the lagom principle (”not too much, not too little, the right amount”), especially when it comes to working/ storage precision. Thus, he will introduce an approach to address the issue of sustainable, but still reliable, computations from the perspective of computer arithmetic tools. Before lowering precision, one must ensure that the simulation is numerically correct, e.g. by relying on alternative floating-point models/ rounding to pinpoint numerical bugs and to estimate the accuracy. We employ VerifiCarlo and its variable precision backend to identify the parts of the code that benefit from smaller floating-point formats. Finally, we show preliminary results on proxy applications.
Recent trends and advancements including more diverse and heterogeneous hardware in High-Performance Computing are challenging scientific software developers in their pursuit of good performance and efficient numerical methods. As a result, the well-known maxim “software outlives hardware” may no longer necessarily hold true, and researchers are today forced to re-factor their codes to leverage these powerful new heterogeneous systems. We present Neko – a portable framework for high-fidelity spectral element flow simulations. Unlike prior works, Neko adopts a modern object-oriented Fortran 2008 approach, allowing multi-tier abstractions of the solver stack and facilitating various hardware backends ranging from general-purpose processors, accelerators down to exotic vector processors and Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) via Neko’s device abstraction layer. Focusing on the performance and accuracy of Neko, we show the first direct numerical simulation (DNS) of a Flettner rotor submerged in a turbulent boundary layer, observing excellent agreement of lift with experimental data. Using a mesh with five million spectral elements, which turns into more than a billion unique degrees of freedom, the simulation requires less than three days to complete on accelerated systems compared to weeks on traditional non-accelerated systems. Finally, we present performance measurements on a wide range of accelerated computing platforms, including the EuroHPC pre-exascale system LUMI, where Neko achieves excellent parallel efficiency for a large DNS of turbulent fluid flow using up to 80% of the entire LUMI supercomputer.