Towards virtual certification of gas turbine engines with performance-portable simulations

We present the large-scale, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation of a full gas-turbine engine compressor, demonstrating capability towards overcoming current limitations for virtual certification of aero-engine design. The simulation is carried out through a performance portable codebase on multi-core/many-core HPC clusters with a CFD-to-CFD coupled execution, combining an industrial CFD solver linked using custom coupler software. The application innovates in its design for performance portability through the OP2 domain specific library for the CFD components, allowing the automatic generation of highly optimized platform-specific parallelizations for both multi-core (CPU) and many-core (GPU) clusters via a single high-level source. The code is used for the simulation of a 4.58B node, full-annulus 10-row production-grade test compressor (DLR’s Rig250), using a coupled sliding-plane setup on the ARCHER2 and Cirrus supercomputers at EPCC. The OP2 generated multiple parallelizations, together with optimized coupler configurations on heterogeneous/hybrid settings achieve, for the first time, execution of 1 revolution in less than 6 hours on 512 nodes of ARCHER2 (65k cores), with a parallel scaling efficiency of over 80% compared to a 107 node run. Results indicate a speed up of the CFD suite by an order of a magnitude (≈ 30×) relative to current production capability. Benchmarking and performance modelling project a time-to-solution of less than 5 hours on a cluster of 488×NVIDIA V100 GPUs, about 3×– 4× speedup over CPU clusters. The work demonstrates a stepchange towards achieving virtual certification of aircraft engines with the requisite fidelity and tractable time-to-solution that was previously out of reach under production settings