SI2-SSE: Collaborative Research: An Intelligent and Adaptive Parallel CPU/GPU Co-Processing Software Library for Accelerating Reactive-Flow Simulations

University Of Connecticut, Storrs CT

Investigators

Abstract

In order to develop the next generation of clean and efficient vehicle engines and power-generating combustors, engineers need the next generation of computational modeling tools. Accurately describing the chemistry of conventional and alternative liquid transportation fuels is vital to predict harmful emission levels and other important quantities, but the high computational cost of detailed models for chemistry poses a significant barrier to use by designers. In order to use such accurate models, software is needed that can efficiently handle chemistry in practical simulations. This collaborative project aims to develop such tools, employing the computational power of modern parallelized central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs). In addition to helping designers create clean and efficient engine technology, the advances made in this project are widely applicable to other computational modeling problems including astrophysics, nuclear reactions, atmospheric chemistry, biochemical networks, and even cardiac electrophysiology. The objective of the proposed effort is to develop software elements specifically targeted at co-processing on GPUs, CPUs, and other many-core accelerator devices to reduce the computational cost of using detailed chemistry and enable high-fidelity yet affordable reactive-flow simulations. This will be achieved by (1) developing and comparing chemical kinetics integration algorithms for parallel operation on CPUs and GPUs/accelerators, (2) developing a method for detecting local stiffness due to chemical kinetics and adaptively selecting the most efficient solver based on available hardware, (3) implementing a computational cell clustering strategy to group similar spatial locations, (4) demonstrating the improved performance offered by these software elements using commercial and open-source computational fluid dynamics codes for modeling reactive flows, and (5) designing a portable and sustainable software library based on the above software elements, including building a community of users. The result of this program will be an open source software library that significantly decreases the cost of using detailed, accurate chemistry in realistic combustion simulations; the success of the program will be determined based on achieving order-of-magnitude performance improvement or better.