ENABLING COMPUTATIONAL DYNAMICS IN DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING ENVIRONMENTS USING A HETEROGENEOUS COMPUTING TEMPLATE

This paper describes a software infrastructure made up of tools and libraries designed to assist developers in implementing computational dynamics applications running on heterogeneous and distributed computing environments. Together, these tools and libraries compose a so called Heterogeneous Computing Template (HCT). The underlying theme of the solution approach embraced by HCT is that of partitioning the domain of interest into a number of sub-domains that are each managed by a separate core/accelerator (CPU/GPU) pair. The five components at the core of HCT, which ultimately enable the distributed/heterogeneous computing approach to large-scale dynamical system simulation, are as follows: (a) a method for the geometric domain decomposition; (b) methods for proximity computation or collision detection; (c) support for moving data within the heterogeneous hardware ecosystem to mirror the migration of simulation elements from subdomain to subdomain; (d) parallel numerical methods for solving the specific dynamics problem of interest; and (e) tools for performing visualization and post-processing in a distributed manner