An Excalibur Design and Development Working Group
An Excalibur Design and Development Working Group
Exascale Computing for System-Level Engineering is a Design and Development Working Group funded by EPSRC and is a collaboration between researchers and developers at the following UK institutions, led by University of Cambridge and University College London: University of Manchester, University of Bristol, University of Edinburgh, Hartree Centre. We also have partnerships with Intel, Codeplay Software Ltd, Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, NSCC-Wuxi, RIKEN, University of Colorado and University of Luxembourg.
The arrival of exascale computers will open new frontiers in our ability to simulate highly complex engineered and natural systems. This will create new opportunities for the design and optimisation of new, highly integrated engineered systems for the future. It will also allow the development of ‘digital twins’ of complex natural systems, such has the human body and coastal/river regions, that will allow exploration and management of engineering-led interventions in personalised healthcare and the natural environment.
The exascale computers of the future will be highly parallel with hundreds of thousands, or millions of processes, working collectively. Exploiting this remarkable level of parallelism will require dramatic advances in the mathematics, numerical methods, software engineering and software tools that underpin simulation, and will depend on experts in each of these areas coming together. The simulation of the different but tightly coupled physical processes that characterise complex engineered and natural systems poses the additional challenges of coordinating the simulation of multiple processes, such as the noise created by an airflow flow around a moving structure under the influence of a magnetic field, or the fluid, solid, electrical and chemical interactions a human body.
This project brings together working groups of experts from computer science, mathematics and engineering to address the challenge of how to simulate coupled physical process at a system level on future exascale systems. It will also address how to integrate into the simulation process the vast quantity of data that can be collected from real systems, how to assess uncertainties and how to interpret the vast quantities of data that exascale simulations will generate. The working group will formulate roadmaps for enabling research for exascale computing, and support research software engineer training for exascale-ready software skills.
