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U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Preparing an Incompressible-Flow Fluid Dynamics Code for Exascale-Class Wind Energy Simulations

Conference ·

The U.S. Department of Energy has identified exascale-class wind farm simulation as critical to wind energy scientific discovery. A primary objective of the ExaWind project is to build high-performance, predictive computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools that satisfy these modeling needs. GPU accelerators will serve as the computational thoroughbreds of next-generation, exascale-class supercomputers. Here, we report on our efforts in preparing the ExaWind unstructured mesh solver, Nalu-Wind, for exascale-class machines. For computing at this scale, a simple port of the incompressible-flow algorithms to GPUs is insufficient. To achieve high performance, one needs novel algorithms that are application aware, memory efficient, and optimized for the latest-generation GPU devices. The result of our efforts are unstructured-mesh simulations of wind turbines that can effectively leverage thousands of GPUs. In particular, we demonstrate a first-of-its-kind, incompressible-flow simulation using Algebraic Multigrid solvers that strong scales to more than 4000 GPUs on the Summit supercomputer.

Research Organization:
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) (SC-21), Exascale Computing Project
DOE Contract Number:
AC36-08GO28308
OSTI ID:
1832419
Report Number(s):
NREL/PR-2C00-81212; MainId:81985; UUID:e39b9eef-3706-46d6-878f-297b13787638; MainAdminID:63294
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English