Section: Application Domains

Co-design of algorithms in scientific applications

Participants : Emmanuel Agullo, Aurélien Falco, Olivier Beaumont, Lionel Eyraud-Dubois, Mathieu Faverge, Marek Felsoci, Luc Giraud, Gilles Marait, Van Gia Thinh Nguyen, Pierre Ramet, Guillaume Sylvand, Alena Shilova.

High performance simulation for ITER tokamak

Scientific simulation for ITER tokamak modeling provides a natural bridge between theory and experimentation and is also an essential tool for understanding and predicting plasma behavior. Recent progresses in numerical simulation of fine-scale turbulence and in large-scale dynamics of magnetically confined plasma have been enabled by access to petascale supercomputers. These progresses would have been unreachable without new computational methods and adapted reduced models. In particular, the plasma science community has developed codes for which computer runtime scales quite well with the number of processors up to thousands cores. The research activities of HiePACS concerning the international ITER challenge have started in the Inria Project Lab C2S@Exa in collaboration with CEA-IRFM and were related to two complementary studies: a first one concerning the turbulence of plasma particles inside a tokamak (in the context of GYSELA code) and a second one concerning the MHD instability edge localized modes (in the context of JOREK code). The activity concerning GYSELA was completed at the end of 2018.

Other numerical simulation tools designed for the ITER challenge aim at making a significant progress in understanding active control methods of plasma edge MHD instability Edge Localized Modes (ELMs) which represent a particular danger with respect to heat and particle loads for Plasma Facing Components (PFC) in the tokamak. The goal is to improve the understanding of the related physics and to propose possible new strategies to improve effectiveness of ELM control techniques. The simulation tool used (JOREK code) is related to non linear MHD modeling and is based on a fully implicit time evolution scheme that leads to 3D large very badly conditioned sparse linear systems to be solved at every time step. In this context, the use of PaStiX library to solve efficiently these large sparse problems by a direct method is a challenging issue.

This activity continues within the context of the EoCoE2 project, in which the PaStiX solver is identified to allow the processing of very larger linear systems for the nuclear fusion code TOKAM3X from CEA-IRFM . Contrary to the JOREK code, the problem to be treated corresponds to the complete 3D volume of the plasma torus. The objective is to be competitive, for complex geometries, compared to an Algebraic MultiGrid approach designed by one partner of EoCoE2 .

Numerical and parallel scalable hybrid solvers in large scale calculations

Parallel and numerically scalable hybrid solvers based on a fully algebraic coarse space correction have been theoretically studied and various advanced parallel implementations have been designed. Their parallel scalability has been initially investigated on large scale problems within the EoCoE project thanks to a close collaboration with the BSC and the integration of MaPHyS within the Alya software. This activity will further develop in the EoCoE2 project. The performance has also been assessed on PRACE Tier-0 machine within a PRACE Project Access through a collaboration with CERFACS and Laboratoire de Physique des Plasmas at Ecole Polytechnique for the calculation of plasma propulsion. A comparative parallel scalability study with the Algebraic MultiGrid from Petsc has been conducted in that framework.

Aeroacoustics Simulation

This domains is in the context of a long term collaboration with Airbus Research Centers. Wave propagation phenomena intervene in many different aspects of systems design at Airbus. They drive the level of acoustic vibrations that mechanical components have to sustain, a level that one may want to diminish for comfort reason (in the case of aircraft passengers, for instance) or for safety reason (to avoid damage in the case of a payload in a rocket fairing at take-off). Numerical simulations of these phenomena plays a central part in the upstream design phase of any such project. Airbus Central R & T has developed over the last decades an in-depth knowledge in the field of Boundary Element Method (BEM) for the simulation of wave propagation in homogeneous media and in frequency domain. To tackle heterogeneous media (such as the jet engine flows, in the case of acoustic simulation), these BEM approaches are coupled with volumic finite elements (FEM). We end up with the need to solve large (several millions unknowns) linear systems of equations composed of a dense part (coming for the BEM domain) and a sparse part (coming from the FEM domain). Various parallel solution techniques are available today, mixing tools created by the academic world (such as the Mumps and Pastix sparse solvers) as well as parallel software tools developed in-house at Airbus (dense solver SPIDO, multipole solver, $\mathscr{H}$-matrix solver with an open sequential version available online). In the current state of knowledge and technologies, these methods do not permit to tackle the simulation of aeroacoustics problems at the highest acoustic frequencies (between 5 and 20 kHz, upper limits of human audition) while considering the whole complexity of geometries and phenomena involved (higher acoustic frequency implies smaller mesh sizes that lead to larger unknowns number, a number that grows like $f^2$ for BEM and $f^3$ for FEM, where f is the studied frequency). The purpose of the study in this domain is to develop advanced solvers able to tackle this kind of mixed dense/sparse linear systems efficiently on parallel architectures.

Optimization for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

The training phase of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks represents nowadays a significant share of the computations performed on HPC supercomputers. It introduces several new problems concerning resource allocation and scheduling issues, because of the specific pattern of task graphs induced by the stochastic gradient descent and because memory consumption is particularly critical when performing training. As of today, the most classical parallelization methods consists in partitioning mini-batches, images, filters,... but all these methods induce high synchronization and communication costs, and only very partially resolve memory issues. Within the framework of the Inria IPL on HPC Big Data and Learning convergence, we are working on re-materialization techniques and on the use of model parallelism, in particular to be able to build on the research that has been carried out in a more traditional HPC framework on the exploitation of resource heterogeneity and dynamic runtime scheduling.