ABSTRACT

PROPOSAL NO.: OCI - 0749223/0749209/0749235/0749286
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: P-K YEUNG /Moser
INSTITUTION: Georgia Institute of Technology

COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: ENABLING DISCOVERY IN HIGH REYNOLDS NUMBER TURBULENCE VIA ADVANCED TOOLS FOR PETASCALE SIMULATION AND ANALYSIS


This research will advance the science of turbulent fluid flow at high Reynolds number, by taking full advantage of emerging Petascale computing capabilities to address a number of important research questions, while setting a new standard for open-source code development in CFD. The science emphasis is on simulations at the finest grid resolution and highest Reynolds number possible, for homogeneous turbulence and inhomogeneous turbulence with one direction of spatial inhomogeneity. Elements of advanced computing will include domain decomposition techniques that scale to future Petascale systems with on million processors or more, high node-level performance making use of advanced hardware features, and enhanced capacity for storage and analysis of very large datasets. Open access to both codes and data will be provided for the research community. Turbulence is characterized by disorderly fluctuations over a wide range of scales in time and space, and is a problem of great complexity and societal and technological importance. Direct numerical simulations (DNS), in which fluctuations are computed according to exact conservation equations is an ideal application for Petascale computation, since computations of this complexity are needed to resolve the wide range of spatial and temporal scales, and because the high reliability of DNS data makes such a resource investment worthwhile. To enable PetaScale DNS (PSDNS), a powerful, flexible and extensible open-source suite of software analyzing the resulting data, for flows with no more than one direction of spatial inhomogeneity will be developed. The PSDNS suite, based on highly scalable components developed by the PIs, will be further developed for extreme parallelism. New software will perform many high Reynolds number DNS to answer pressing questions in turbulence research. These simulations and analyses will yield critical discoveries in diverse areas of turbulence research, including intermittency in turbulent dispersion, the high Reynolds number overlap layer in wall-turbulence, and local extinction and reignition in turbulent reacting flows. This research will have broad societal and economic impact through advances in turbulence research and computational science. DNS at unprecedented Reynolds numbers will impact science, engineering, society and competitiveness in such areas as mixing and dispersal of pollutants, design and drag of transportation vehicles, and efficiency and pollution in combustion processes. This activity will also impact education in high performance computing through development of materials based on these Petascale software developments. It will impact education in fluid mechanics and turbulence through materials developed from the simulations. Finally, all of this will be performed while encouraging participation at all levels by under-represented groups.

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