A. Dubey

A. Dubey, B. Van Straalen

Among the present generation of multiphysics HPC simulation codes there are many that are built upon general infrastructural frameworks. This is especially true of the codes that make use of structured adaptive mesh refinement (SAMR) because of unique demands placed on the housekeeping aspects of the code. They have varying degrees of abstractions between the infrastructure such as mesh management and IO and the numerics of the physics solvers. In this experience report we summarize the experiences and lessons learned from two of such major software efforts, FLASH and Chombo.

A. Dubey, S. Brandt, R. Brower et al.

Large, complex, multi-scale, multi-physics simulation codes, running on high performance com-puting (HPC) platforms, have become essential to advancing science and engineering. These codes simulate multi-scale, multi-physics phenomena with unprecedented fidelity on petascale platforms, and are used by large communities. Continued ability of these codes to run on future platforms is as crucial to their communities as continued improvements in instruments and facilities are to experimental scientists. However, the ability of code developers to do these things faces a serious challenge with the paradigm shift underway in platform architecture. The complexity and uncertainty of the future platforms makes it essential to approach this challenge cooperatively as a community. We need to develop common abstractions, frameworks, programming models and software development methodologies that can be applied across a broad range of complex simulation codes, and common software infrastructure to support them. In this position paper we express and discuss our belief that such an infrastructure is critical to the deployment of existing and new large, multi-scale, multi-physics codes on future HPC platforms.