Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has become a mature technology in engineering design, contributing strongly to industrial competitiveness and sustainability across a wide range of sectors (e.g. transportation, power generation, disaster prevention). Future growth depends upon the exploitation of massively parallel HPC architectures, how-ever this is currently hampered by performance scaling bottlenecks.
The ambitious exaFOAM project aims to overcome these limitations through the development and validation of a range of algorithmic improvements. Improvements across the entire CFD process chain (preprocessing, simulation, I/O, post-processing) will be developed. Effectiveness will be demonstrated via a suite of HPC Grand Challenge and Indus-trial Application Challenge cases. All developments will be implemented in the open-source CFD software OpenFOAM, one of the most successful open-source projects in the area of computational modelling, with a large industrial and academic user base.
To ensure success, the project mobilises a highly-capable consortium of 12 beneficiaries consisting of experts in HPC CFD algorithms and industrial applications and includes universities, HPC centres, SMEs and code release authority OpenCFD Ltd (openfoam.com) as a linked third party to the PI. Project manage-ment will be facilitated by a clear project structure and quantified objectives enable tracking of the project progress.
Special emphasis will be placed on ensuring a strong impact of the exaFOAM project. The project has been conceived to address all expected impacts set out in the Work Pro-gramme. All developed code and validation cases will be released as open-source to the community in coordination with the Open-FOAM Governance structure. The involvement of 17 industrial supporters and stake-holders from outside the consortium under-scores the industrial relevance of the project outcomes. A well-structured and multichannelled plan for dissemination and exploitation of the project outcomes further reinforces the expected impact.
