ALCF Science 1 - Argonne National Laboratory

argonne leadership computing facility
Chemistry
Performing the Largest Unstructured Large Eddy Simulation
of a Real, Full Combustion Chamber
The increase of computer power has allowed science to make
important strides in a variety of domains such as plasma studies,
biomechanics, and molecular dynamics. With access to the INCITE
program, researchers from CERFACS (the European Centre for Research
and Advanced Training in Scientific Computation) have been able to
perform top-of-the-line quality simulations on highly complex cases in
their goal towards the fully numerical modeling of a real combustor.
INCITE Allocation:
8 Million Hours
INCITE PROGRAM
This research is focused on Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of gas turbine
engines with the inclusion of liquid phase phenomena. CERFACS has
performed simulations and validation of two-phase flow experiments.
In parallel, taking advantage of the leadership-class computer available
at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, the researchers have
performed the largest unstructured LES done to date of a real, full
combustion chamber (330 million elements) on more than 16K cores.
This simulation contributes to the validation of the LES approach when
dealing with combustion instabilities. In these cases, the effects of
mesh refinement are a highly critical point that was validated during
the Stanford Center for Turbulence Research (CTR) summer program.
A second mesh independency validation was performed, but this
time it used a simpler, two-phase-flow single burner with three levels
of refinement (4-, 8-, and 16-million elements). These results were
published in the CTR Proceedings of the 2010 Summer Program by
Cambridge University Press. Evaluation of the unbalance observed in
Lagrangian simulations remains to be performed.
“The impact of the INCITE project
on our research is essential because
it brings capacities that were
simply not available up to now and
allows us to compute real engines
and not only laboratory-simplified
setups. The development of the
solver itself in collaboration with
Argonne research scientists is also
essential. Our team has worked
with the ALCF’s Dr. Balakrishnan
at Stanford this summer, finishing
the 330-million-cell compressible
simulation, which had never been
done before. Together, we also
have sent a proposal for the G8
exascale initiative, in which we
prepare our codes for the nextgeneration
machine.”
11
Fields of temperature and pressure in
a simulation of a complete helicopter
chamber performed on the IBM Blue Gene/P
at the ALCF (July 2010).
Contact Thierry Poinsot
CERFACS | Thierry.poinsot@cerfacs.fr