Migration of a generic multi-physics framework to HPC environments

Abstract

Creating a highly parallelizable code is a challenge and development for distributed memory machines (DMMs) can be very different form developing a serial code in term of algorithms and structure. For this reason, many developers in the field prefer to develop their own code from scratch. However, for an already existing framework with large development background the idea of transformation becomes attractive in order to reuse the effort done during years of development. In this presentation we explain how a relatively complex framework but with modular structure can be prepared for high performance computing with minimum modification. Kratos Multi-Physics [1] is an open source generic multi-disciplinary platform for solution of coupled problems consist of fluid, structure, thermal and electromagnetic fields. The parallelization of this framework is performed with objective of enforcing the less possible changes to its different solver modules and encapsulate the changes as much as possible in its common kernel. This objective is achieved thanks to the Kratos design and also innovative way of dealing with data transfers for a multi-disciplinary code. This work is completed by the migration of the framework from the x86 architecture to the Marenostrum Supercomputing platform. The migration has been verified by a set of benchmarks which show very good scalability, from which we present the Telescope problem in this paper.