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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 73 records · Page 4

A Study of Parallel Scalability and Dynamic Workload Balancing in GlennICE

The Glenn Icing Computational Environment (GlennICE) is a computational tool designed to calculate ice growth on complex three-dimensional geometries. It utilizes user-supplied computational fluid dynamics solutions for the geometry of interest. Key developments include advancements in convergence of collection efficiency, trajectory optimization, and refinement methodology. These improvements have significantly enhanced GlennICE’s efficiency for practical engineering applications. A recent study focused on benchmarking GlennICE’s scalability in a parallel environment using static scheduling. Findings indicated a potential twofold increase in efficiency through workload balance enhancements. This paper presents an analysis of the solver’s new workload balancing improvements, incorporating shared memory and dynamic scheduling routines. Results demonstrate a highly efficient and consistent algorithm across high-performance computing clusters.

Computational Icing↗

A Study of Parallel Scalability and Dynamic Workload Balancing in GlennICE

The Glenn Icing Computational Environment (GlennICE) is a computational tool designed to calculate ice growth on complex three-dimensional geometries. It utilizes user-supplied computational fluid dynamics solutions for the geometry of interest. Key developments include advancements in convergence of collection efficiency, trajectory optimization, and refinement methodology. These improvements have significantly enhanced GlennICE’s efficiency for practical engineering applications. A recent study focused on benchmarking GlennICE’s scalability in a parallel environment using static scheduling. Findings indicated a potential twofold increase in efficiency through workload balance enhancements. This paper presents an analysis of the solver’s new workload balancing improvements, incorporating shared memory and dynamic scheduling routines. Results demonstrate a highly efficient and consistent algorithm across high-performance computing clusters.

Computational Icing↗

Evaluation of intracoronary hemodynamics identifies perturbations in vorticity

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is highly prevalent and associated with adverse events. Challenges have emerged in the treatment of intermediate coronary artery stenoses. These lesions are often interrogated with fractional flow reserve (FFR) testing to determine if a stenosis is likely to be causative for ischemia in a cardiac territory. This invasive test requires insertion of a pressure wire into a coronary vessel. Recently computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been used to noninvasively assess fractional flow reserve in vessels reconstructed from medical imaging data. However, many of these simulations are unable to provide additional information about intravascular hemodynamics, including velocity, endothelial shear stress (ESS), and vorticity. We hypothesized that vorticity, which has demonstrated utility in the assessment of ventricular and aortic diseases, would also be an important hemodynamic factor in CAD. Three-dimensional (3D), patient-specific coronary artery geometries that included all vessels >1 mm in diameter were created from angiography data obtained from 10 patients who underwent diagnostic angiography and FFR testing (n = 9). A massively parallel CFD solver (HARVEY) was used to calculate coronary hemodynamic parameters including pressure, velocity, ESS, and vorticity. These simulations were validated by comparing velocity flow fields from simulation to both velocities derived from in vitro particle image velocimetry and to invasively acquired pressure wire-based data from clinical testing. There was strong agreement between findings from CFD simulations and particle image velocimetry experimental testing (p < 0.01). CFD-FFR was also highly correlated with invasively measured FFR (ρ = 0.77, p = 0.01) with an average error of 5.9 ± 0.1%. CFD-FFR also had a strong inverse correlation with the vorticity (ρ = -0.86, p = 0.001). Simulations to determine the effect of the coronary stenosis on intravascular hemodynamics demonstrated significant differences in velocity and vorticity (both p < 0.05). Further evaluation of an angiographically normal appearing non-FFR coronary vessel in patients with CAD also demonstrated differences in vorticity when compared with FFR vessels (p < 0.05). The use of highly accurate 3D CFD-derived intravascular hemodynamics provides additional information beyond pressure measurements that can be used to calculate FFR. Vorticity is one parameter that is modified by a coronary stenosis and appears to be abnormal in angiographically normal vessels in patients with CAD, highlighting a possible use-case in preventative screening for early coronary disease.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

MARBLES (Multi-scale Adaptively Refined Boltzmann LatticE Solver) [SWR-23-37]

MARBLES (Multi-scale Adaptively Refined Boltzmann LatticE Solver) is an open-source computational fluid dynamics package powered by the lattice Boltzmann equations and built on AMReX. In the lattice Boltzmann method, local collisions between meso-scale fictitious particles drive the governing equations which enables MARBLES to easily simulate flow around complex and/or moving geometry without the generation of a body-conforming mesh. Using AMReX data structures and operations ensures a high level of computational performance and parallel scaling on heterogenous architectures while also naturally supporting locally enhanced grid resolution and fidelity through automatic mesh refinement. New domains and problem definitions are easily specified through an input file with examples and guidance on all options and variables provided in the MARBLES documentation.

Henry de Frahan, Marc↗

Computational strategies for three-dimensional flow simulations on distributed computer systems

An increasing amount of research activity in computational fluid dynamics has been devoted to the development of efficient algorithms for parallel computing systems. The increasing performance to price ratio of engineering workstations has led to research to development procedures for implementing a parallel computing system composed of distributed workstations. This thesis proposal outlines an ongoing research program to develop efficient strategies for performing three-dimensional flow analysis on distributed computing systems. The PVM parallel programming interface was used to modify an existing three-dimensional flow solver, the TEAM code developed by Lockheed for the Air Force, to function as a parallel flow solver on clusters of workstations. Steady flow solutions were generated for three different wing and body geometries to validate the code and evaluate code performance. The proposed research will extend the parallel code development to determine the most efficient strategies for unsteady flow simulations.

Weed, Richard Allen↗

Recent Advancements in the PATO Material Response Code

Introduction: Predicting the complicated multiphysics phenomena during atmospheric entry requires high-fidelity modeling tools to refine estimates of mission risks during entry. To this end, new capabilities are being added to the Porous-material Analysis Toolbox based on OpenFOAM (PATO). PATO is an open-source software for Computational Material Response (CMR) of reactive porous materials submitted to high-temperature environments. The objective of this work is to highlight current efforts to add to and improve upon the modeling capabilities of PATO. These include efforts to loosely couple PATO with other discipline specialized codes including hypersonic Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), to assess the interaction effects between pyrolysis gas blowing and the boundary layer, and Computational Solid Mechanics (CSM), to address modeling of mechanical erosion. Other refinements include surface phenomena modeling capabilities to address the effects of silicone-based coatings applied to the TPS during flight preparation, and a unified multiphase solver for a mixed porous-material and plain-fluid domain. Coupling CMR with CFD (CMR/CFD): A loose coupling between PATO and the Data Parallel Line Relaxation (DPLR) CFD code has been achieved by making use of a blowing boundary condition at the heatshield surface available in DPLR. Starting with heat flux estimates with no pyrolysis gas blowing at the surface, blowing gases are computed by the CMR and passed to the CFD such that aerothermal properties of the environment can be recomputed for a new CMR computation. This leads to an iterative process which is supplemented with an estimate of the radiative heat flux using the Nonequilibrium air radiation (NEQAIR) program. The entire iterative process is illustrated in Figure 1. This coupling strategy has been utilized in computing the MSL material response. The goal is to compare the coupled CMR/CFD results with material response results obtained using traditional blowing corrections. Coupling CMS with CMR: A mechanical erosion model is currently being implemented in PATO to account for the additional mass removal induced by high shear conditions. The modeling process at each timestep consists of updating the mechanical properties as a function of temperature and computing the stress tensor and displacement fields of the material. Then, a failure criteria model determines the regions in which the stress exceeds the ultimate strength values resulting in mesh movement to account for mass removal. This model allows the material response simulation to compute the recession due to both oxidation and shear-induced erosion. The model is demonstrated by computing material response of sphere-cone arc jet samples. Surface Modeling Capabilities: NuSil, a silicone-based coating, was sprayed onto the MSL and Mars 2020 heatshields to mitigate shedding of phenolic dust. To better understand the effects of the NuSil coating on the material response, a novel model has been implemented in PATO. In this model, the equilibrium of the charred NuSil surface is modeled as pure silica, and a constant offset, inspired by the classical spallation model, is added to the the char blowing rate and wall enthalpy to reproduce HyMETS experimental results. The model has also been used to estimate the 3D material response of the MSL heatshield. Unified Solver: In addition to the iterative loose coupling approach mentioned above, a multiphase unified solver is being developed to couple the environment (plain-fluid phase) and the porous-material phase. The solver is based on the volume averaged conservation of mass, momentum, and energy for the macroscale with closure models which include microscale effects through effective physicochemical properties. The unified solver has been used to compute flow through a porous plug and solve the Beavers and Joseph problem. Since the strong coupling between phases is inherent to this solver, modeling assumptions present in other coupling methods of material response are mitigated. This strategy also makes it feasible to capture the competition between surface and volume ablation in the same computational domain, which is usually not possible with other coupling approaches.

Material Response↗

Recent Advancements in the PATO Material Response Code

Introduction: Predicting the complicated multiphysics phenomena during atmospheric entry requires high-fidelity modeling tools to refine estimates of mission risks during entry. To this end, new capabilities are being added to the Porous-material Analysis Toolbox based on OpenFOAM (PATO) [1,2,3]. PATO is an open-source software for Computational Material Response (CMR) of reactive porous materials submitted to high-temperature environments. The objective of this work is to highlight current efforts to add to and improve upon the modeling capabilities of PATO. These include efforts to loosely couple PATO with other discipline specialized codes including hypersonic Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), to assess the interaction effects between pyrolysis gas blowing and the boundary layer, and Computational Solid Mechanics (CSM), to address modeling of mechanical erosion. Other refinements include surface phenomena modeling capabilities to address the effects of silicone-based coatings applied to the TPS during flight preparation, and a unified multiphase solver for a mixed porous-material and plain-fluid domain. Coupling CMR with CFD (CMR/CFD): A loose coupling between PATO and the Data Parallel Line Relaxation (DPLR) [4] CFD code has been achieved by making use of a blowing boundary condition at the heatshield surface available in DPLR. Starting with heat flux estimates with no pyrolysis gas blowing at the surface, blowing gases are computed by the CMR and passed to the CFD such that aerothermal properties of the environment can be recomputed for a new CMR computation. This leads to an iterative process which is supplemented with an estimate of the radiative heat flux using the Nonequilibrium air radiation (NEQAIR) [5] program. The entire iterative process is illustrated in Figure 1. This coupling strategy has been utilized in computing the MSL material response. The goal is to compare the coupled CMR/CFD results with material response results obtained using traditional blowing corrections. Coupling CMS with CMR: A mechanical erosion model is currently being implemented in PATO to account for the additional mass removal induced by high shear conditions. The modeling process at each timestep consists of updating the mechanical properties as a function of temperature and computing the stress tensor and displacement fields of the material. Then, a failure criteria model determines the regions in which the stress exceeds the ultimate strength values resulting in mesh movement to account for mass removal. This model allows the material response simulation to compute the recession due to both oxidation and shear-induced erosion. The model is demonstrated by computing material response of sphere-cone arc jet samples. Surface Modeling Capabilities: NuSil, a silicone-based coating, was sprayed onto the MSL and Mars 2020 heatshields to mitigate shedding of phenolic dust. To better understand the effects of the NuSil coating on the material response, a novel model has been implemented in PATO. In this model, the equilibrium of the charred NuSil surface is modeled as pure silica, and a constant offset, inspired by the classical spallation model, is added to the the char blowing rate and wall enthalpy to reproduce HyMETS experimental results. The model has also been used to estimate the 3D material response of the MSL heatshield [6]. Unified Solver: In addition to the iterative loose coupling approach mentioned above, a multiphase unified solver is being developed to couple the environment (plain-fluid phase) and the porous-material phase. The solver is based on the volume averaged conservation of mass, momentum, and energy for the macroscale with closure models which include microscale effects through effective physicochemical properties. The unified solver has been used to compute flow through a porous plug and solve the Beavers and Joseph problem [7]. Since the strong coupling between phases is inherent to this solver, modeling assumptions present in other coupling methods of material response are mitigated. This strategy also makes it feasible to capture the competition between surface and volume ablation in the same computational domain, which is usually not possible with other coupling approaches.

Thermal Protection Systems↗

An Adaptive-Mesh-Refinement Based Computational Tool for Simulating Catalysis at Mesoscale

In this work, we present a computational tool for mesoscale applications using open-source exascale- computing compatible adaptive-mesh-refinement (AMR) library, AMReX [2]. AMReX is software library that enables development of application solvers with block-structured Cartesian AMR. Our tool has capabilities to include realistic geometry representation, chemical species transport, reactions and thermodynamics that are critical for capturing mesoscale physics. A significant achievement is the ability of our solver to automatically import electron microscopy data in the form of a stereolithography (STL) or pixelated file format (mrc, tiff) without undergoing the tedious task of unstructured mesh generation. This feature allows for rapid simulation of catalyst particles with complex morphologies using an immersed-boundary formulation. The use of AMR allows for higher resolutions at catalyst surface interfaces, which in turn provides an accurate description of surface reactions and transport. Our solver uses a hybrid distributed and shared memory parallelism (OpenMP/GPU-based) with which strong scaling up to 10,000 processors for realistic catalyst particle simulations have been demonstrated.

BIOMASS FUELS,MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Multigrid treatment of implicit continuum diffusion

Implicit treatment of diffusive terms of various differential orders common in continuum mechanics modeling, such as computational fluid dynamics, is investigated with spectral and multigrid algorithms in non-periodic 2D domains. In doubly periodic time dependent problems these terms are handled efficiently by spectral methods, but in non-periodic systems solved with distributed memory parallel computing and 2D domain decomposition, this efficiency is lost for a large number of processors. Here, we built and present here a multigrid algorithm for these types of problems that outperforms a spectral solution employing the highly optimized FFTW library. This solver is suitable for high performance computing and may be able to efficiently treat implicit diffusion of arbitrary order by introducing auxiliary equations of lower order. We test these solvers for fourth and sixth order diffusion with harmonic test functions as well as turbulent 2D magnetohydrodynamic simulations. It is also shown that an anisotropic operator without mixed-derivative terms improves model accuracy and speed, and we examine the impact that the various diffusion operators have on the energy, the enstrophy, and the qualitative aspect of a simulation.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Functionality Improvements to Overaero

The functionality of the overset, static aeroelasticity, Navier-Stokes flow solver OVERAERO was increased by adding capability to the flow solver and enhancing code performance. Improvements were made to the fluids/structure interface, an MLP version of the parallel OVERAERO code was developed, and the OVERAERO-MPI code was ported to the Cray T3E. The OVERFLOW-MPI and OVERAERO-MPI codes were tested successfully on the IPG testbed and a means of reducing communication overhead within OVERFLOW-MPI was investigated. To solve an aeroelastic problem computationally, a structures grid surface definition and a fluids grid surface definition are required. Typically, the structures grid surface has a lower fidelity than the fluids grid surface. Thus, the methods developed to transfer data between the two grid systems are vital to the accuracy and efficiency of the aeroelasticity code. The fluids/structures interface developed for the OVERAERO code was improved to more accurately treat fluids surfaces that bridge between two different structural surfaces. For example, the method allowed the forward portion of a flap track fairing to deform with the wing and the aft end of the fairing to deform with the flap. A tightly-coupled version of the code based on OVERFLOW-MLP was developed to improve code performance on the SGI Origin 2000. This required a new parallelization strategy to couple the fluids and structures codes. The OVERAERO-MPI code was ported to the Cray T3E to extend the usability of the code. The port required extensive use of dynamic memory management techniques to fit large problems within the memory limitations of the T3E. The OVERFLOW-MPI and OVERAERO-MPI codes were tested on the IPG testbed being developed within NASA. For small problems with minimal data transfer between grids, there was little to no performance penalty spreading the computation across two machines. For very large problems, methods were developed to minimize intermachine communication via the grid partitioning scheme. By minimizing the intermachine communication requirements of the problem, it may still be beneficial to run a tightly-coupled flow solver across two machines within the IPG.

Gee, Ken↗

Strategies for the GPU Implementation of the OVERFLOW CFD Code

Wondering how to port a large, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver, written in Fortran, to run effectively on GPUs? Join this talk to learn about the strategies NASA’s OVERFLOW CFD code has used to effectively utilize GPUs to greatly improve the time to solution compared to CPUs. OVERFLOW is an overset, structured grid, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) flow solver developed by NASA and widely used by government, US industry, and academia. It is known for its effective use of CPU hardware, but this talk will discuss recent efforts to modify the code to run efficiently on GPUs. We will describe our use of OpenACC, CUDA Fortran, and CUDA C++, discussing why and how we use each to map our problem onto NVIDIA GPUs. We will also describe structural changes we made in the code to expose enough parallelism to effectively use the GPU hardware. Finally, we will present the performance benefits from running OVERFLOW on GPUs compared to the well optimized CPU version of the code.

GPU Programming↗

Applying Time-Parallelization to Turbulent Flows

Parallelization of the temporal domain is explored for the solution of turbulent flows. Multigrid reduction-in-time (MGRIT) is used to advance the large-scale fluid dynamics in time sequentially on the coarsest space-time grid but propagate the information in time parallel on all other levels. The goal of this process is to accurately and efficiently resolve the coarse-scale turbulence structure and use that to drive the fine-scales of the turbulent flow. The extra forcing from nonlinear multigrid facilitates the coupling and interaction between fine and coarse scales, through which the multiscale nonlinear physics is properly captured. Adaptive mesh refinement is employed to finely resolve only the regions with strong gradients, which provides further computational efficiency. The underlying computational fluid dynamics solver is a fourth-order finite-volume scheme with the standard 4-stage Runge-Kutta method. An advanced approach is devised and implemented to enable MGRIT to solve highly turbulent flows successfully. Furthermore, the method is applied to solve a Taylor-Green vortex problem and a doubleshear-layer turbulent mixing flow. Results are promising, validating that MGRIT with the filtering approach has the potential to efficiently solve general turbulent flows.

Computational Fluid Dynamics↗

Runtime volume visualization for parallel CFD

This paper discusses some aspects of design of a data distributed, massively parallel volume rendering library for runtime visualization of parallel computational fluid dynamics simulations in a message-passing environment. Unlike the traditional scheme in which visualization is a postprocessing step, the rendering is done in place on each node processor. Computational scientists who run large-scale simulations on a massively parallel computer can thus perform interactive monitoring of their simulations. The current library provides an interface to handle volume data on rectilinear grids. The same design principles can be generalized to handle other types of grids. For demonstration, we run a parallel Navier-Stokes solver making use of this rendering library on the Intel Paragon XP/S. The interactive visual response achieved is found to be very useful. Performance studies show that the parallel rendering process is scalable with the size of the simulation as well as with the parallel computer.

Ma, Kwan-Liu↗

Distributed-Memory Computing With the Langley Aerothermodynamic Upwind Relaxation Algorithm (LAURA)

The Langley Aerothermodynamic Upwind Relaxation Algorithm (LAURA), a Navier-Stokes solver, has been modified for use in a parallel, distributed-memory environment using the Message-Passing Interface (MPI) standard. A standard domain decomposition strategy is used in which the computational domain is divided into subdomains with each subdomain assigned to a processor. Performance is examined on dedicated parallel machines and a network of desktop workstations. The effect of domain decomposition and frequency of boundary updates on performance and convergence is also examined for several realistic configurations and conditions typical of large-scale computational fluid dynamic analysis.

Riley, Christopher J.↗

Performance Optimization Methods for a Memory-Bound, Unstructured-Grid CFD Application on Massively Parallel GPU Platforms

Computational performance of the FUN3D unstructured-grid computational fluid dynamics (CFD) application on massively parallel GPU environments is memory-bound and highly dependent upon efficient reads from and atomic updates to the irregular cell-, edge-, and node-based data structures. In this talk, we present recent efforts into optimizing select performance-critical kernels on NVIDIA Tesla V100 and A100 GPUs and AMD CDNA MI100 GPUs. A novel use of L2 cache residency controls and asynchronous loads into on-chip shared memory are explored on the A100 GPU for the sparse iterative solver, which is dominated by mixed-precision, sparse matrix vector multiplication. Demonstrations show that these methods improve global memory bandwidth utilization by 13.5% on the A100 GPU. Several techniques are also presented that use registers and/or shared memory to facilitate array transposition and aggregation which combine to reduce the frequency and increase the cache efficiency of floating-point atomic updates to the irregular data structures. These methods are demonstrated to improve the kernel throughput by nearly 500% on select kernels on the AMD MI100 over atomic updates directly to global memory. Overall, both V100 and A100 GPUs outperformed the MI100 GPU on kernels dominated by double-precision atomic updates; however, the techniques demonstrated here reduced the performance gap and improved the MI100 performance.

GPU CPU unstructured CFD memory↗

Visualization of unsteady computational fluid dynamics

The current computing environment that most researchers are using for the calculation of 3D unsteady Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) results is a super-computer class machine. The Massively Parallel Processors (MPP's) such as the 160 node IBM SP2 at NAS and clusters of workstations acting as a single MPP (like NAS's SGI Power-Challenge array) provide the required computation bandwidth for CFD calculations of transient problems. Work is in progress on a set of software tools designed specifically to address visualizing 3D unsteady CFD results in these super-computer-like environments. The visualization is concurrently executed with the CFD solver. The parallel version of Visual3, pV3 required splitting up the unsteady visualization task to allow execution across a network of workstation(s) and compute servers. In this computing model, the network is almost always the bottleneck so much of the effort involved techniques to reduce the size of the data transferred between machines.

Haimes, Robert↗

Fierro

FIERRO is a parallel C++ code designed to simulate fluid mechanics, heat transfer, and solid mechanics in two- and three dimensional space. FIERRO is written to run on homogeneous (CPU) and heterogeneous (CPU+GPU) high performance computing machines. Fierro can aid a) modeling and design efforts that have historically relied on commercial implicit and explicit finite element codes, b) numerical methods research, c) manufacturing research, and d) computer science research. The code contains diverse numerical methods to solve the governing physics equations for both quasi-static and dynamic problems. Mathematical optimization solvers are coupled to the numerical methods to research topology and shape optimization that has application to additive manufacturing, and to create novel numerical approaches. Phase-field methods with micromechanical solvers are provided to simulate microstructure formation and evolution in manufacturing processes. The micromechanical solvers can also help research efforts create continuum-scale constitutive models for solids, as a function of the microstructure, in situ in a calculation or in a stand-alone manner. No physical data exists within the code.

Morgan, Nathaniel↗

Fierro Version 2.x

FIERRO is a parallel C++ code designed to simulate fluid mechanics, heat transfer, and solid mechanics in two- and three-dimensional space. FIERRO is written to run on homogeneous (CPU) and heterogeneous (CPU+GPU) high performance computing machines. Fierro can aid a) modeling and design efforts that have historically relied on commercial implicit and explicit finite element codes, b) numerical methods research, c) manufacturing research, and d) computer science research. The code contains diverse numerical methods to solve the governing physics equations for both quasi-static and dynamic problems. Mathematical optimization solvers are coupled to the numerical methods to research topology and shape optimization that has application to additive manufacturing, and to create novel numerical approaches. Phase-field methods with micromechanical solvers are provided to simulate microstructure formation and evolution in manufacturing processes. The micromechanical solvers can also help research efforts create continuum-scale constitutive models for solids, as a function of the microstructure, in situ in a calculation or in a stand-alone manner. No physical data exists within the code.

Morgan, Nathaniel↗