The Department of Energy is working with several industry partners to advance the development of software for exascale computing.
An article written by Jeremy Thomas, from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory public affairs team details how computer-aided design and engineering could benefit from exascale computing.
The DOE has been working with several industry partners as part of its Exascale Computing Project (ECP) Industry Council, an external advisory group of prominent US companies helping to define the industrial computing requirements for a future exascale ecosystem.
Thomas writes that one of the Industry Council members, engineering software provider, Altair, develops its CAE software suite HyperWorks and its HPC workload management solution PBS Works which rely on HPC to explore the vast design space afforded by advanced manufacturing processes, and to study the physics behind the designs to validate them.
‘The need for exascale becomes extremely important because the size and complexity of the model increases as you do multiphysics simulations’ said Sam Mahalingam Altair’s chief technical officer (CTO).
‘This is a lot more complex model that allows you to truly understand what the interference and interactions are from one domain to another. In my opinion, exascale is truly going to contribute to capability computing in solving problems we have not solved before, and it’s going to make sure the products are a lot more optimised and introduced to the market a lot faster’ Mahalingam added.
Altair is already looking towards exascale computing to enable cognitive computing and deep learning for engineering applications that can deliver data-driven models that are much closer to a final, polished product.
The company is also exploring the use programming paradigms like CHARM++, PMIx, as well as middleware designed for exascale applications. The company is exploring scheduling that will cater to exascale and is keeping a close watch on hardware announcements.
In the opinion of Mahalingam, it is critical that companies scale up solvers and make sure multiphysics simulations can run effectively on next generation systems in order to stay competitive.
The full article from Jeremy Thomas is available on the Exascale Computing Project website in addition to other resources detailing the projects goals and progress.
