Compressible Axial Turbine simulations on GPU with OpenFOAM

Abstract

This use case focuses on compressible turbomachinery OpenFOAM simulations, which are executed on both CPUs and GPUs, unlocking the full potential of modern heterogeneous HPC systems.

Introduction

USE CASE CHALLENGE:

Turbomachinery simulations involve several complexities, including stator-rotor interactions, and turbulent high-speed flows.

USE CASE AIM:

1. Implement a software integration process to run simulations of axial turbine stages within the OpenFOAM.com framework on CPUs.

2. Enhance the zeptoFOAM prototype to enable the first OpenFOAM turbine analyses on GPUs.

USE CASE DEVELOPMENT / DESCRIPTION:

· OpenFOAM features integration and test case definition.

· GPU porting activities for compressible flows and rotating regions.

USE CASE BENEFITS:

Running on GPUs significantly reduces the number of partitions for large cases, such as transient simulations of turbomachinery stages.

Medium-sized simulations currently run on hundreds of cores could potentially be executed on a single modern GPU, leading to more flexible and cost-effective hardware configurations.

Industry sectors application

Manufacturing, Energy, Aerospace

Application field

Computational Fluid Dynamics, GPU acceleration