Most of the complex flow phenomena observed in manufacturing processes are relating to or coupled with other physical or chemical phenomenon such as turbulence diffusion, structure deformation, heat transfer, electromagnetic field or chemical reaction. While computer simulations are rapidly spreading in industry as useful engineering tools, their limitations to such coupled phenomena have come to realize recently. This is because of the fact that each simulation method has been optimized to a specific phenomenon and once two or more solvers of different phenomena are coupled for such a complicated target, its computational performance is seriously degraded. This is especially true when we utilize a high-performance computer such as “K-computer”. In such a situation, in addition to the fundamental difficulty of treating different time or spatial scales, interpolation of physical quantities like pressure or velocity at the interface of two different phenomena requires additional computer costs and communications among processor cores. Different mesh topology and hence data structures among each simulation and treatment of different time or spatial scales also deteriorate single processor performance. We understand that one of the keys to solve these problems is to adopt unified structured mesh and data structure among multiple simulations for coupled phenomena.
The objective of the project is to propose a unified simulation method of solving multiple partial differential equations by developing common fundamental techniques such as the effective algorithms of multi-scale phenomena or the simulation modeling for effective utilization of the cutting-edge massively parallel computer architecture. The target of the unified simulation is supposed to be complex and combined phenomena observed in manufacturing processes in industrial circles and our final goal is to contribute to enhance Japanese technological capabilities and industrial process innovation through the high-performance computing simulation. The project is conducted at RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science.
| Makoto Tsubokura (Team Leader) |
| Keiji Onishi (Research Associate) |
| Chung Gan Lee (Post Doctoral Fellow) |
Complex Phenomena Unified Simulation Research Team |