Scalable Post-Processing of Large-Scale Numerical Simulations of Turbulent Fluid Flows

Abstract

Military, space, and high-speed civilian applications will continue contributing to the renewed interest in compressible, high-speed turbulent boundary layers. To further complicate matters, these flows present complex computational challenges ranging from the pre-processing to the execution and subsequent post-processing of large-scale numerical simulations. Exploring more complex geometries at higher Reynolds numbers will demand scalable post-processing. Modern times have brought application developers and scientists the advent of increasingly more diversified and heterogeneous computing hardware, which significantly complicates the development of performance-portable applications. To address these challenges, we propose Aquila, a distributed, out-of-core, performance-portable post-processing library for large-scale simulations. It is designed to alleviate the burden of domain experts writing applications targeted at heterogeneous, high-performance computers with strong scaling performance. We provide two implementations, in C++ and Python; and demonstrate their strong scaling performance and ability to reach 60% of peak memory bandwidth and 98% of the peak filesystem bandwidth while operating out of core. We also present our approach to optimizing two-point correlations by exploiting symmetry in the Fourier space. A key distinction in the proposed design is the inclusion of an out-of-core data pre-fetcher to give the illusion of in-memory availability of files yielding up to 46% improvement in program runtime. Furthermore, we demonstrate a parallel efficiency greater than 70% for highly threaded workloads.