Live Webcast 15th Annual Charm++ Workshop

Multiphysics simulations are playing increasingly important roles in computational science and engineering for applications ranging from aircraft design to medical treatments. These simulations require integration of techniques and tools from multiple disciplines, and in turn demand new advanced technologies to integrate independently developed physics solvers effectively. In this paper, we overview some numerical, geometrical, and system software components required by such integration, with a concrete case study of detailed, three-dimensional, parallel rocket simulations involving system-level interactions among fluid, solid, and combustion, as well as subsystem-level interactions. We package these components into a software framework that provides state-of-the-art, common-refinement based methods for transferring data between potentially nonmatching meshes, novel and robust face-offsetting methods for tracking Lagrangian surface meshes, as well as integrated support for parallel mesh optimization, remeshing, algebraic manipulations, performance monitoring, and high-level data management and I/O. From these general, reusable framework components we construct domain-specific building blocks to facilitate integration of parallel, multiphysics simulations from high-level specifications that are easy to read and can also be visualized graphically. Through a non-intrusive integration framework, these building blocks are integrated with independently developed fluid, solid, and combustion codes that may use different types of meshes (structured vs. unstructured), discretization methods (finite element or finite volume), and different programming languages (Fortran 90 or C++). Through examples, we demonstrate the flexibility of our framework and its components.