Project Aims
exaFOAM aimed to enhance the performance scalability of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) applications on massively parallel high-performance computing (HPC) systems.
Project Achievements
The exaFOAM project published a series of benchmarks, ranging from microbenchmarks, up to industrial test cases and two grand challenges about high-fidelity airplane aerodynamics and gas turbine combustion. These can be found in the OpenFOAM HPC Technical Committee repository (https://develop.openfoam.com/committees/hpc/-/tree/develop/).
HLRS and Wikki GmbH have developed a new mesh and file format, named coherent, which eliminates bottlenecks in OpenFOAM workflows. The advantage of the coherent mesh format is that it drastically reduces the number of files that a file system must manage. Test versions are available on the public exaFOAM repositories (https://develop.openfoam.com/exafoam and https://gitlab.com/openfoam/community/exafoam), along with other developments.
Using the new developed coherent file format, members of the exaFOAM team successfully completed a benchmark simulation using HLRS’s supercomputer Hawk in which OpenFOAM scaled up to 4,096 nodes (524,288 CPU cores), which is the largest OpenFOAM simulation to this date (https://www.hlrs.de/news/detail/coherent-file-format-accelerates-time-to-solution-with-openfoam). For this achievement the team received the 19th HPC Innovation Excellence Award from Hyperion Research (https://insidehpc.com/2023/11/hyperion-research-announces-winners-of-hpc-innovation-excellence-awards-3/).
Future Objectives
Specially the activities porting OpenFOAM to GPUs are currently underway.
01. April 2021 - 31. March 2024
exafoam.eu
Exascale Computing
HPC for Industry
Numerical Methods and Libraries
Project and User Management, Accounting
H2020-JTI-EuroHPC-2019-1 (EuroHPC-03-2019)
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This project has received funding from the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 956416.
The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Croatia, Greece, and Portugal.
Head, Project and User Management, Accounting
Deputy Head, Department of Numerical Methods & Libraries
