Towards Extreme-Scale Simulations for Low Mach Fluids with Second-Generation Trilinos

Abstract

Trilinos is an object-oriented software framework for the solution of large-scale, complex multi-physics engineering and scientific problems. While Trilinos was originally designed for scalable solutions of large problems, the fidelity needed by many simulations is significantly greater than what one could have envisioned two decades ago. When problem sizes exceed a billion elements even scalable applications and solver stacks require a complete revision. The second-generation Trilinos employs C++ templates in order to solve arbitrarily large problems. We present a case study of the integration of Trilinos with a low Mach fluids engineering application (SIERRA low Mach module/Nalu). Through the use of improved algorithms and better software engineering practices, we demonstrate good weak scaling for up to a nine billion element large eddy simulation (LES) problem on unstructured meshes with a 27 billion row matrix on 524,288 cores of an IBM Blue Gene/Q platform.