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Andrea Lani edited this page Feb 14, 2024 · 177 revisions

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Welcome to the new COOLFluiD wiki!

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COOLFluiD (Computational Object-Oriented Libraries for Fluid Dynamics) is a component- based framework for scientific high-performance computing, CFD and multi-physics applications, originally developed at the Von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics and at the KU Leuven Center for mathematical Plasma Astrophysics (CmPA).

Watch 2019 presentation at AMS seminar @NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division

Watch 2014 presentation at AMS seminar @NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division


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COOLFluiD provides a powerful infrastructure for enabling concurrent multi-physics simulations, possibly exploiting multiple MPI communicators, heterogeneous CPU/GPU computing, massively parallel I/O capabilities, loosely coupled multi-domain simulations.


NEWS:

[14/01/2023] Job opening: we are currently looking for a postdoctoral fellow with relevant numerical expertise with high-order methods (preferably Flux Reconstruction, but also DG, Spectral FD/FV) and solid coding skills in C++ for further developing our Flux Reconstruction solver for 3D hypersonic flows, including thermo-chemical nonequilibrium and laminar-to-turbulence transition modelling. Applications are welcome till 5/31/2023. Details are available here.

[27/04/2020] Job opening: we are currently looking for a doctoral student with relevant numerical expertise and solid coding skills in C++ for further developing multi-fluid/Maxwell models for simulating solar atmosphere phenomena within KU Leuven's TRACESpace project. The position will start on the 1st October 2020. Details are available here.

[18/03/2020] Job opening: we are currently looking for a qualified postdoctoral researcher with solid CFD expertise in the modeling of hypersonic, chemically reacting flows and, ideally, Maxwell equations to join our team and contribute to the MEESST project. The position will start on the 1st October 2020. Details are available here.

[28/02/2020] The COOLFluiD team is involved (with numerical modeling/simulations) in a prestigious Future Emerging Technologies (FET) project from the EU Horizon2020 program, titled MHD Enhanced Entry System for Space Transportation (MEESST), aiming at developing a magnetic shielding technology for next-generation spacecrafts. MEESST will help mitigating surface thermal loads and radio communication blackout during re-entry phases in planetary atmospheres by prototyping an innovative MHD-enabling system based on the latest superconducting technology. Andrea Lani (COOLFluiD's project manager) is the PI of the 3-year project (~3.5 million euros).

[14/10/2019] The COOLFluiD team and the Center for mathematical Plasma Astrophysics (CmPA) are urgently looking for a postdoc in computational modeling of magnetized plasmas to develop new generation global solar corona models. Keywords for the position in question: MHD, multi-fluid models, Finite Volume, C/C++, python, Paraview/Tecplot, Gmsh, parallel computing. The corresponding 2-year research project is funded by the US Air Force. The application page is here. If you need more details, you can contact andrea.lani@kuleuven.be.

[15/06/2018] Many congratulations to Sahadeo Ramjatan who has won the third place in the Outstanding Student Oral Presentation competition at the 15th International Planetary Probe Workshop (IPPW-2018). Sahadeo (now PhD student at the University of Minnesota) presented his work on Blackout Analysis of Martian Reentry Missions where all CFD simulations of hypersonic chemical nonequilibrium flows over Martian reentry capsules have been performed with the COOLFluiD-ATD solver.

[18/05/2018] COOLFluiD was included as a case study example in the latest PRACE annual report.

[27/10/2017] A week-long detailed COOLFluiD training has been given to Roketsan CFD engineers during the week 23rd-27th October.

[16/07/2017] Within the PRACE preparatory access project OPTIMAS, the time-accurate, implicit, multi-fluid/Maxwell plasma Finite Volume solver has been successfully run on up to 60,000 cores on the XC40 Hazel Hen system at HLRS and up to 16,000 cores on the Blue Gene/Q JUQUEEN at JSC. Those runs also include parallel I/O. In order to achieve this, many code improvements have been implemented, including:

  • a more straightforward and efficient parallel synchronization algorithm for non-updatable DOFs;
  • a significant memory optimization for the reading algorithm;
  • a fix in the parallel reading algorithm affecting the collective reading of boundary connectivity data;
  • an algorithm to select a user-defined number of writing processes (aggregators) in each node;
  • a fix for the parallel mesh extruder, now able to create arbitrarily large 3D grids (tested up to 3 billion cells so far);
  • a mechanism to bypass the self-registration of polymorphic objects for compilers (like IBM's) that seem not to support it.

[29/06/2017] A new unstructured solver based on the Flux Reconstruction method has been developed in collaboration with KU Leuven. The code is steady, fully implicit, parallel, works for 2D and 3D (only quads and hexahedra are supported for the moment), Euler and Navier-Stokes, P1-P2-P3-P4-P5 (solution), P1-P2 (geometry) and can export the solution in both TECPLOT and Paraview. This represents the basic kernel for massive future developments, particularly targeted towards steady and unsteady high-order high-speed flows and plasma simulations.

[23/02/2017] COOLFluiD has been awarded 1/2 million CPU-hours through a PRACE HPC Preparatory Access (Type C) call. The goal will be to port the code on both CRAY (Hazel Hen, Gauss/HLRS, 185,088 CPU-cores #14 in Top500) and IBM Blue Gene/Q (JUQUEEN, Gauss/JSC, 458,752 CPU-cores #19 in Top500) systems, to optimize its parallel partitioning and I/O in order to scale on >100k cores.

[04/01/2017] Happy New Year picture: the first unsteady simulation of the complex thermochemical nonequilibrium plasma flow (with shock speed up to 10 Km/s) inside the NASA Electric Arc Shock Tube (EAST) facility with COOLFluiD aerothermodynamic solver and the PLATO thermochemical library (by Alessandro Munafo' at UIUC).

Full video available here (courtesy of Khalil Bensassi and many thanks to the NAS team at NASA Ames for the visualization).

EAST

[12/12/2016] COOLFluiD will benefit from Performance Optimisation & Productivity (POP), A Centre of Excellence in Computing Applications support for optimizing its massively parallel radiation code based on Finite Volume/Discrete Ordinate Method.

[10/12/2016] Three speakers from the COOLFluiD team (Alejandro Alvarez Laguna, Yana Maneva and Nataly Ozak Munoz) will present novel solar plasma simulation results at the AGU next week:

[04/12/2016] COOLFluiD latest news are now posted on Twitter.

[06/11/2016] COOLFluiD works with PARALUTION 1.1.0 using the CUDA back-end (basic single-core version). The implicit Multi-fluid / Maxwell solver has been partially (i.e. w/o diffusive terms) ported to GPU: either GPU-enabled PETSc or PARALUTION linear system solvers can be used with it. More testing and optimization are ongoing.

[01/10/2016] COOLFluiD works now also with PETSc 3.7.3, including CUDA bindings.

[07/06/2016] COOLFluiD contributes to NASA Ames Comparative Heliophysics Summer Program with the project "Multi-fluid global simulations of the Earth’s magnetosphere with multiple ions".

[25/05/2016] COOLFluiD scalability tested on NASA Pleiades up to 40k CPU-cores.

[25/02/2016] COOLFluiD works now also with PETSc 3.6.3, including CUDA bindings.

[01/11/2015] COOLFluiD Solar is on Slack.

[22/10/2014] COOLFluiD MHD magnetospheric model has been recently integrated into the first European Virtual Space Weather Modeling Center (VSWMC) together with many other models from all around Europe within a ESA GSTP program.


COOLFluiD is not:

  • "just" a CFD solver;
  • a fancy infrastructure promising multi-physics but only tested on toy problems;
  • a commercial code that will always give you an answer (right or not);
  • a monolithic piece of code with limited possibilities of evolution;
  • a free lunch for anybody (users or developers);
  • perfect, well documented and fully accomplished ... but we are working on it :)

COOLFluiD is a open end collaborative platform providing a powerful set of tools for:

  • solving toy or complex applications with existing numerical solvers;
  • building totally new or customized models/solvers with arbitrary data-structures;
  • easily defining reusable components (e.g. algorithms, models, BCs, wrappers);
  • building virtual prototypes and easily test new algorithms or models;
  • interfacing or coupling other libraries/solvers to tackle more complex problems;
  • large scale simulations.

COOLFluiD is developed open-source. Suggestions and contributions are welcome.


Gallery of applications

Available solvers and capabilities

HOWTO

Documentation

Development team

Citing COOLFluiD