Section: New Software and Platforms

CLAC

CLAC is a generic Discontinuous Galerkin solver, written in C/C++, based on the OpenCL and MPI frameworks. CLAC means “Conservation Laws Approximation on many Cores”.

It is clear now that future computers will be made of a collection of thousands of interconnected multicore processors. Globally it appears as a classical distributed memory MIMD machine. But at a lower level, each of the multicore processors is itself made of a shared memory MIMD unit (a few classical CPU cores) and a SIMD unit (a GPU). When designing new algorithms, it is important to adapt them to this kind of architecture. Our philosophy will be to program our algorithms in such a way that they can be run efficiently on this kind of computers. Practically, we will use the MPI library for managing the coarse grain parallelism, while the OpenCL library will efficiently operate the fine grain parallelism.

We have invested for several years until now into scientific computing on GPUs, using the open standard OpenCL (Open Computing Language). We were recently awarded a prize in the international AMD OpenCL innovation challenge thanks to an OpenCL two-dimensional Vlasov-Maxwell solver that fully runs on a GPU. OpenCL is a very interesting tool because it is an open standard now available on almost all brands of multicore processors and GPUs. The same parallel program can run on a GPU or a multicore processor without modification.

CLAC is also a joint project with a Strasbourg small company, AxesSim, which develops software for electromagnetic simulations.

Because of the envisaged applications of CLAC, which may be either academic or commercial, it is necessary to conceive a modular framework. The heart of the library is made of generic parallel algorithms for solving conservation laws. The parallelism can be both fine-grained (oriented towards GPUs and multicore processors) and coarse-grained (oriented towards GPU clusters). The separate modules allow managing the meshes and some specific applications. In this way, it is possible to isolate parts that should be protected for trade secret reasons. The open source part of CLAC will be made freely available on the web later on. We have made an APP deposit of the first version of CLAC in October 2012. The versioning of CLAC project is also registered in the Inria Forge (http://clac.gforge.inria.fr ).