OPTIMA

Optimizing Industrial Applications for Heterogeneous HPC systems

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In OPTIMA one of the objectives is to develop the industrial use cases and the libraries using the programming environments of the OPTIMA framework so as to take full advantage of the underlying novel HPC system. The 4 industrial use cases from 3 distinct different application areas are: 

In this post we will explain the application of MESHFREE, particle-based computational fluid dynamics:

The simulation software MESHFREE has been developed since 1999 at the Fraunhofer ITWM  with regard to industrial applications. It is a meshfree approach to simulate flows and continuum mechanic processes. By not using a numeric mesh the method is versatile and efficient regarding simulations with moving boundary elements, free surfaces, interphases, and fluid-structure-interaction. 

MESHFREE allows for flexible model development and thus enables a wide spectrum of applications, including large-scale applications in the context of safety-relevance and sustainable energy, such as:

  • Virtual water management
  • Simulation of vehicle rollover in a crash situation
  • Hydropower

To model these applications in the industrial context, it is essential to efficiently handle large amounts of data – complex input data and detailed simulation results. Input geometries of more than a million boundary elements are standard and more than 5 million discretization points may be needed to achieve adequate precision for complex load cases. In addition, the simulation process is computationally expensive as MESHFREE employs implicit methods (solutions of linear systems of equations).

In 2018 the software was extended by the solver library SAMG which is developed by the Fraunhofer SCAI. 

In the course of the OPTIMA project, some tasks within the software, particularly in the point cloud organization, will be ported to FPGA systems for accelerated computation.