OpenFPM: A scalable open framework for particle and particle-mesh codes on parallel computers

Scalable and efficient numerical simulations continue to gain importance, as computation is firmly established as the third pillar of discovery, alongside theory and experiment. Meanwhile, the performance of computing hardware grows through increasing heterogeneous parallelism, enabling simulations...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2018-04
Main Authors: Incardona, Pietro, Leo, Antonio, Zaluzhnyi, Yaroslav, Ramaswamy, Rajesh, Sbalzarini, Ivo F
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Computational fluid dynamics
Computer simulation
Discrete element method
Distributed memory
Finite element method
Fluid flow
Hardware
Infrastructure
Mathematical models
Molecular dynamics
Monte Carlo simulation
Parallel computers
Simulation
Smooth particle hydrodynamics
Software
Solvers
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Summary:Scalable and efficient numerical simulations continue to gain importance, as computation is firmly established as the third pillar of discovery, alongside theory and experiment. Meanwhile, the performance of computing hardware grows through increasing heterogeneous parallelism, enabling simulations of ever more complex models. However, efficiently implementing scalable codes on heterogeneous, distributed hardware systems becomes the bottleneck. This bottleneck can be alleviated by intermediate software layers that provide higher-level abstractions closer to the problem domain, hence allowing the computational scientist to focus on the simulation. Here, we present OpenFPM, an open and scalable framework that provides an abstraction layer for numerical simulations using particles and/or meshes. OpenFPM provides transparent and scalable infrastructure for shared-memory and distributed-memory implementations of particles-only and hybrid particle-mesh simulations of both discrete and continuous models, as well as non-simulation codes. This infrastructure is complemented with portable implementations of frequently used numerical routines, as well as interfaces to third-party libraries. We present the architecture and design of OpenFPM, detail the underlying abstractions, and benchmark the framework in applications ranging from Smoothed-Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) to Molecular Dynamics (MD), Discrete Element Methods (DEM), Vortex Methods, stencil codes, high-dimensional Monte Carlo sampling (CMA-ES), and Reaction-Diffusion solvers, comparing it to the current state of the art and existing software frameworks.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1804.07598