MFC 5.0: An exascale many-physics flow solver

Wilfong, Benjamin [Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)] (ORCID:0009000100746668); Le Berre, Henry A. [Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)] (ORCID:0000000247819502); Radhakrishnan, Anand [Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)] (ORCID:0000000151272741); Gupta, Ansh [Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)] (ORCID:0009000165999105); Vickers, Daniel J. [Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)] (ORCID:0000000252315528); Vaca-Revelo, Diego [Worcester Polytechnic Institute, MA (United States)] (ORCID:0000000248119057); Adam, Dimitrios [Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)] (ORCID:0009000943472984); Yu, Haocheng [Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)]; Lee, Hyeoksu [California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, CA (United States)]; Chreim, Jose Rodolfo [California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, CA (United States)]; Carcana Barbosa, Mirelys [Brown Univ., Providence, RI (United States)] (ORCID:0000000258062701); Zhang, Yanjun [California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, CA (United States)] (ORCID:0000000260024501); Cisneros-Garibay, Esteban [Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL (United States)] (ORCID:0000000325033215); Gnanaskandan, Aswin [Worcester Polytechnic Institute, MA (United States)] (ORCID:0000000161356084); Rodriguez Jr, Mauro [Brown Univ., Providence, RI (United States)] (ORCID:0000000305450265); Budiardja, Reuben D. [Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)] (ORCID:0000000303958532); Abbott, Stephen [Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Bloomington, MN (United States)] (ORCID:000900001028819X); Colonius, Tim [California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, CA (United States)] (ORCID:0000000303263909); Bryngelson, Spencer H. [Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)] (ORCID:0000000317507265)

doi:10.1016/j.cpc.2026.110055

DOE OSTI · 3019954

MFC 5.0: An exascale many-physics flow solver

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Abstract

Many problems of interest in engineering, medicine, and the fundamental sciences rely on high-fidelity flow simulation, making performant computational fluid dynamics solvers a mainstay of the open-source software community. Previous work MFC 3.0 was made a published, documented, and open-source solver via Bryngelson et al. Comp. Phys. Comm. (2021) with numerous physical features, numerical methods, and scalable infrastructure. MFC 5.0 is a significant update to MFC 3.0, featuring a broad set of well-established and novel physical models and numerical methods, as well as the introduction of GPU and APU (or superchip) acceleration. Here, we exhibit state-of-the-art performance and ideal scaling on the first two exascale supercomputers, OLCF Frontier and LLNL El Capitan. Combined with MFC’s single-accelerator performance, MFC achieves exascale computation in practice, and achieved the largest-to-date public CFD simulation at 200 trillion grid points as a 2025 ACM Gordon Bell Prize finalist. New physical features include the immersed boundary method, N-fluid phase change, Euler–Euler and Euler–Lagrange sub-grid bubble models, fluid-structure interaction, hypo- and hyper-elastic materials, chemically reacting flow, two-material surface tension, magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), and more. Numerical techniques now represent the current state-of-the-art, including general relaxation characteristic boundary conditions, WENO variants, Strang splitting for stiff sub-grid flow features, and low Mach number treatments. Weak scaling to tens of thousands of GPUs on OLCF Summit and Frontier and LLNL El Capitan achieves efficiencies within 5% of ideal to over 90% of their respective system sizes. Strong scaling results for a 16-times increase in device count show parallel efficiencies over 90% on OLCF Frontier. MFC’s software stack has undergone further improvements, including continuous integration, which ensures code resilience and correctness through over 300 regression tests; metaprogramming, which reduces code length while maintaining performance portability; and code generation for computing chemical reactions

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Wilfong, Benjamin [Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)] (ORCID:0009000100746668), Le Berre, Henry A. [Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)] (ORCID:0000000247819502), Radhakrishnan, Anand [Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)] (ORCID:0000000151272741), Gupta, Ansh [Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)] (ORCID:0009000165999105), Vickers, Daniel J. [Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)] (ORCID:0000000252315528), Vaca-Revelo, Diego [Worcester Polytechnic Institute, MA (United States)] (ORCID:0000000248119057), Adam, Dimitrios [Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)] (ORCID:0009000943472984), Yu, Haocheng [Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)], Lee, Hyeoksu [California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, CA (United States)], Chreim, Jose Rodolfo [California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, CA (United States)], Carcana Barbosa, Mirelys [Brown Univ., Providence, RI (United States)] (ORCID:0000000258062701), Zhang, Yanjun [California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, CA (United States)] (ORCID:0000000260024501), Cisneros-Garibay, Esteban [Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL (United States)] (ORCID:0000000325033215), Gnanaskandan, Aswin [Worcester Polytechnic Institute, MA (United States)] (ORCID:0000000161356084), Rodriguez Jr, Mauro [Brown Univ., Providence, RI (United States)] (ORCID:0000000305450265), Budiardja, Reuben D. [Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)] (ORCID:0000000303958532), Abbott, Stephen [Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Bloomington, MN (United States)] (ORCID:000900001028819X), Colonius, Tim [California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, CA (United States)] (ORCID:0000000303263909), Bryngelson, Spencer H. [Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)] (ORCID:0000000317507265). 2026-01-30. MFC 5.0: An exascale many-physics flow solver. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpc.2026.110055

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