Handbook of European HPC projects

SCALABLE

SCAlable LAttice Boltzmann Leaps to Exascale

In SCALABLE, eminent industrials and academic partners will team up to improve the performance, scalability, and energy efficiency of an industrial LBM-based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. 

Lattice Boltzmann methods (LBM) have already evolved to become trustworthy alter-natives to conventional CFD. In several engineering applications, they are shown to be roughly an order of magnitude faster than Navier-Stokes approaches in a fair comparison and in comparable scenarios. 

In the context of EuroHPC, LBM is especially well suited to exploit advanced supercomputer architectures through vectorization, accelerators, and massive parallelization. 

In the public domain research code waLBerla, superb performance and outstanding scalability has been demonstrated, reaching more than a trillion (1012) lattice cells already on Petascale systems. WaLBerla performance excels because of its uncompromising unique, architecture-specific automatic generation of optimized compute kernels, together with carefully designed parallel data structures. However, is not compliant with industrial applications due to lack of a geometry engine and user friendliness for non-HPC experts. 

On the other hand, the industrial CFD software LaBS already has such industrial capabilities at a proven high level of maturity, but it still has performance worthy of improvement. 

SCALABLE will make the most of these two existing CFD tools (waLBerla and LaBS, the ProLB software) notably by transferring cut-ting-edge technology and aiming to break down the silos between the scientific computing world and that of physical flow modelling in order to deliver improved efficiency and scalability for the upcoming European Exascale systems. 

The project outcomes will directly benefit to the European industry as confirmed by the active involvement of Renault and Airbus in the SCALABLE project, and will additionally contribute to fundamental research. 

The Karolina supercomputer (IT4Innovations, VSB-TUO) – 3 CFD numerical simulations on air-craft from various perspectives 

Industrial software codes for extreme scale computing environments and applications

Call:
EuroHPC-03-2019

Coordinating Organization:
CS-Group France, France

Project Timespan
2021-01-01 – 2023-12-31

Other Partners:
  • Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
  • CERFACS – Centre Européen de Recherche et de Formation Avancée en Calcul Scientifique, France
  • FZJ – Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Germany
  • Neovia Innovation, France
  • IT4Innovations – VSB – Technical University of Ostrava, Czechia
  • Airbus Operations GmbH, Germany
  • RENAULT SAS, France