Acceleration of a Full-Scale Industrial CFD Application with OP2

Abstract

Hydra is a full-scale industrial CFD application used for the design of turbomachinery at Rolls Royce plc., capable of performing complex simulations over highly detailed unstructured mesh geometries. Hydra presents major challenges in data organization and movement that need to be overcome for continued high performance on emerging platforms. We present research in achieving this goal through the OP2 domain-specific high-level framework, demonstrating the viability of such a high-level programming approach. OP2 targets the domain of unstructured mesh problems and enables execution on a range of back-end hardware platforms. We chart the conversion of Hydra to OP2, and map out the key difficulties encountered in the process. Specifically we show how different parallel implementations can be achieved with an active library framework, even for a highly complicated industrial application and how different optimizations targeting contrasting parallel architectures can be applied to the whole application, seamlessly, reducing developer effort and increasing code longevity. Performance results demonstrate that not only the same runtime performance as that of the hand-tuned original code could be achieved, but it can be significantly improved on conventional processor systems, and many-core systems. Our results provide evidence of how high-level frameworks such as OP2 enable portability across a wide range of contrasting platforms and their significant utility in achieving high performance without the intervention of the application programmer.