Imperial Research Software Engineering (RSE) Community Meeting - May 2016

The May 2016 meeting of the Imperial College Research Software Engineering (RSE) Community will take place on Thursday 26th May, 16:00 – 18:00 in the Huxley Building, LT144, on the South Kensington Campus. We will have a main talk from Dr Peter Vincent, Department of Aeronautics and lead of the PyFR project (http://www.pyfr.org), followed by a set of 3-minute lightning talks* and an RSE discussion.

The draft agenda is as follows:

16:00 PyFR: Next-Generation High-Order Computational Fluid Dynamics on Modern Hardware Platforms, Peter Vincent, Department of Aeronautics

16:30 3-minute lightning talks* (if you'd like to volunteer to give a lightning talk, please e-mail jeremy.cohen@imperial.ac.uk with a title and short overview of your topic)

17:00 RSE discussion

17:30 Networking; Drinks and snacks available

Main talk:

PyFR: Next-Generation High-Order Computational Fluid Dynamics on Modern Hardware Platforms

High-order numerical methods for unstructured grids combine the superior accuracy of high-order spectral or finite difference methods with the geometrical flexibility of low-order finite volume or finite element schemes. The Flux Reconstruction (FR) approach unifies various high-order schemes for unstructured grids within a single framework. Additionally, the FR approach exhibits a significant degree of element locality, and is thus able to run efficiently on modern many-core hardware platforms, such as Graphical Processing Units (GPUs). The aforementioned properties of FR mean it offers a promising route to performing affordable, and hence industrially relevant, scale-resolving simulations of hitherto intractable unsteady flows within the vicinity of real-world engineering geometries. In this talk I will present PyFR (www.pyfr.org), an open-source Python based framework for solving advection-diffusion type problems using the FR approach. The framework is designed to solve a range of governing systems on mixed unstructured grids containing various element types. It is also designed to target a range of hardware platforms via use of a custom Mako-derived domain specific language. The latest release of PyFR is able to solve the compressible Euler and Navier-Stokes equations on grids of quadrilateral and triangular elements in two dimensions, and hexahedral, tetrahedral, prismatic, and pyramidal elements in three dimensions, targeting clusters of multi-core CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs, AMD GPUs, Intel Xeon Phis, and heterogeneous mixtures thereof. Results will be presented for various benchmark and `real-world' flow problems, and scalability of PyFR will be demonstrated on clusters with 1000s of NVIDIA GPUs. Throughout the talk the importance of algorithm-software-hardware co-design, in the context of next-generation computational fluid dynamics, will be highlighted.

Project page: http://www.pyfr.org

* Lightning talks: The lightning talks are intended to provide an opportunity for you to give a brief, informal overview of a topic that you think may be of interest to other community members. You may want to introduce an application or tool you've been working on or a library that you think may be of interest to other developers. Perhaps you've recently read a great blog post that you'd like to highlight, or you have an RSE-related idea you'd like to present and get some feedback on in the susequent discussion session.

• Lightning talks will have a limit of 3 minutes each.
• Presenters may provide 1 slide to use as a background for their presentation.
• If you'd like to give a lightning talk, please send a title and a couple of sentences describing your topic to jeremy.cohen@imperial.ac.uk