ExaCT holds all-hands meeting at CRF

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On May 14, the Center for Exascale Simulation of Combustion in Turbulence (ExaCT) held its biannual all-hands meeting at the CRF. The meeting was attended by computer scientists, applied mathematicians and computational combustion scientists from ExaCT, and high-performance computing (HPC) vendors and computer scientists associated with DOE’s X-Stack program (aimed at developing programming environments for exascale supercomputers). Presentations focused on the Center’s progress, future directions, and interactions with computer scientists in the broader DOE community. A panel discussion with exascale HPC vendors—Intel, IBM, Nvidia, AMD, and Whamcloud—entitled ‘Beyond the Mini-App’ identified interaction models between vendor hardware architects and ExaCT.

Exact is a combustion co-design center of multidisciplinary researchers—computer scientists, mathematicians, and computational combustion scientists. This collaboration includes researchers from Lawrence Livermore, Lawrence Berkeley, Oak Ridge, and Los Alamos national laboratories and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory as well as the universities of Utah, Nebraska, and Texas–Austin; Stanford University; Georgia Tech; and Rutgers University. This multidisciplinary team has been working together for the past year and a half of a five-year project to iteratively and simultaneously design all aspects of the combustion simulation process—from algorithms to programming models to hardware architecture—in order to create high-fidelity, first-principles direct numerical simulation of turbulent combustion that can run effectively on future machines that are three orders of magnitude faster than today’s petascale supercomputers.