Illinois Rocstar is currently negotiating a Phase I SBIR contract with the US Department of Energy to “Harden” the Rocstar Simulation Suite currently maintained by Illinois Rocstar. Mr. Michael Campbell will lead this project. The goal of this project is to harden the ASCI-developed Rocstar multiphysics simulation application and distribute it under a permissive, open source license. Expert users from government, industry, and academia currently employ Rocstar on modern HPC platforms for a variety of multiphysics simulations. When completed, this project will produce the only open source massively parallel multiphysics application that is freely available, and that stands ready to utilize the nation’s modern HPC resources. Once hardened for ease of installation and use, Rocstar will help lower the entry barriers to HPC-based M&S.
Many of today’s important and challenging problems in science and engineering involve multiple, complex, interacting physical systems, often incorporating different material states and combustion or other sources of energy release. Examples of such systems include fluid-structure interaction (FSI), conjugate heat transfer (CHT), thermo-mechanical coupling (TMC), and shock-to-detonation of energetic materials (SDT). Multiphysics refers to coupled, advanced modeling and simulation (M&S) techniques used to simulate these interacting systems.
Large-scale M&S of such multiphysics problems using high performance computing (HPC) has become a crucial component of research and development in the private sector, academia, and the national laboratories. Private and industrial use of HPC M&S has consistently lagged behind that of government and academia however. This underutilization is in large part due to significant technical and economic barriers to the availability, development, ownership, and operation of HPC-ready software tools for computer-aided science and engineering [Council on Competitiveness (2011)].
In recent years, there has been a significant DOE investment in developing and enhancing an open infrastructure for HPC-based M&S. Advanced computational tools developed under DOE ASCI, ASCR, FASTMath, NEAMS, CASL and others are freely available to investigators for use in developments that stand ready to take advantage of the nation’s HPC resources. ASCR SBIR funding has also resulted in useful open tools such as Kitware’s Computational Model Builder (CMB) and the Illinois Rocstar Multiphysics Application Coupling Toolkit (IMPACT). This project seeks to bring these investments to bear on lowering barriers to HPC-aided M&S adoption in advanced manufacturing and engineering industries.
