ARCHIVED: Petascale computing on the TeraGrid: Enabling Discovery in High Reynolds Number Turbulence via Advanced Tools for Petascale Simulation and Analysis

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Note: The project described in this document is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) to use TeraGrid's petascale environments for highly advanced scientific analysis and simulations that advance the frontiers of scientific and engineering research. For more, see ARCHIVED: Petascale computing on the TeraGrid.

This project advances the science of turbulent fluid flow at high Reynolds number by taking advantage of petascale computing capabilities to address a number of important research questions, while setting a new standard for open-source code development in computational fluid dynamics.

The science emphasis is on simulations at the finest grid resolution and highest Reynolds number possible for homogeneous and inhomogeneous turbulence with one direction of spatial inhomogeneity. Elements of advanced computing will include domain decomposition techniques that scale to petascale systems with enhanced capacity for storage and analysis of very large data sets. 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 because:

Computations of this complexity are needed to resolve the wide range of spatial and temporal scales.
The high reliability of DNS data makes such a resource investment worthwhile.

To enable petascale DNS (PSDNS), the project will develop a powerful, flexible and extensible open-source suite of software for analyzing the resulting data (for flows with no more than one direction of spatial inhomogeneity). The PSDNS suite, based on highly scalable components developed by the principal investigators, 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.

For more, see award abstracts #0749235, #0749223, #0749209, and #0749286 on the NSF web site.