SPP 1648: Software for Exascale Computing - Subproject: EXA-DUNE - Flexible PDE Solvers, Numerical Methods, and Applications (EXA-DUNE)

Basic data for this project

Description

The aim of this interdisciplinary project, bringing together experts from the open source projects DUNE and FEAST, is to develop, analyse and realise new numerical, algorithmic and computational techniques to enable exascale computing for partial differential equations (PDEs) on heterogeneous massively parallel architectures. As the life time of PDE software is typically much longer than for hardware, flexible but nevertheless hardware-specific software components are developed based on the DUNE platform, which uses state-of-the-art programming techniques to achieve great flexibility and high efficiency to the advantage of a steadily growing user-community. Hardware-oriented numerical techniques of the FEAST project are integrated to optimally exploit the performance of the local (heterogeneous) nodes (multi-core multi-purpose CPUs, special purpose acceleration units like GPUs, etc.), w.r.t. specific structures of the given PDEs. The introduction of a hardware abstraction layer will make it possible to perform the necessary hardware-specific changes of essential components at compile time with at most minimal changes of the application code. Further adding to the great benefits from a combination of the strengths of DUNE and FEAST, modern numerical discretisations and solver approaches like adaptive multi-grid, localised spectral methods (e.g. higher-order Discontinous Galerkin schemes) and a hybrid parallel grid will increase the scalability. The EXA-DUNE toolbox is extended from petascale towards exascale level computing by introducing multi-level Monte Carlo methods for uncertainty quantification and multi-scale techniques which both add an additional layer of coarse grained parallelism, as they require the solution of many weakly coupled problems. The new methodologies and software concepts are applied to flow and transport processes in porous media (fuel cells, CO2 sequestration, large scale water transport), which are grand challenge problems of high relevance to society.