July 2026 OLCF User Conference Call: CFD at Quadrillion-DOF Scale on Frontier

The OLCF hosts monthly User Conference Calls. These calls are your opportunity to speak with center personnel to get the latest updates, express any concerns you may have, etc. No registration is required for this event. An email with an invite to the event will be sent to OLCF users approximately one week beforehand.

Monthly Topic:  CFD at 1 quadrillion degrees of freedom via unified memory on OLCF Frontier

Speakers: Spencer Bryngelson (GA Tech)

Abstract:

We present an optimized implementation of the recently proposed information geometric regularization (IGR) for unprecedented scale simulation of compressible fluid flows. We improve upon state-of-the-art computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques along computational cost, memory footprint, and energy-to-solution metrics. Unified memory on coupled CPU-GPU (e.g., OLCF Frontier) or APU (e.g., LLNL El Capitan) platforms increases problem size with negligible overhead. Mixed half/single-precision storage and computation on well-conditioned numerics is used. We simulate flow at 200 trillion grid points and 1 quadrillion degrees of freedom, exceeding largest ever simulations by >20. A factor of 4 wall-time speedup is achieved over optimized baselines. Ideal weak scaling is seen on OLCF Frontier, LLNL El Capitan, and CSCS Alps using the full systems. Strong scaling is near ideal at extreme conditions, at about 60% efficiency on Frontier with an 8-node baseline and stretching to the full system.

Spencer Bryngelson is faculty at Georgia Tech. His group works to resolve grand challenge engineering problems via predictive simulation and scalable, high fidelity algorithms. He is the institutional PI for two DOE PSAAP IV centers on this topic. Spencer has been a visitor at Pacific Northwest National Lab, Stanford, and MIT. Prior, he was a postdoc at Caltech, and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His group was a 2025 ACM Gordon Bell Prize finalist. Spencer received the ORAU Powe Award for Junior Faculty, the Illinois Outstanding Dissertation award, and the Hassan Aref prize for fluid dynamics research, among others. He serves on the executive board of the OLCF User Group.

Slides | Tip of the Month | Recording

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