Browsing by Author "Uekermann, Benjamin"

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Open Access
Efficient and scalable initialization of partitioned coupled simulations with preCICE
(2021) Totounferoush, Amin; Simonis, Frédéric; Uekermann, Benjamin; Schulte, Miriam
preCICE is an open-source library, that provides comprehensive functionality to couple independent parallelized solver codes to establish a partitioned multi-physics multi-code simulation environment. For data communication between the respective executables at runtime, it implements a peer-to-peer concept, which renders the computational cost of the coupling per time step negligible compared to the typical run time of the coupled codes. To initialize the peer-to-peer coupling, the mesh partitions of the respective solvers need to be compared to determine the point-to-point communication channels between the processes of both codes. This initialization effort can become a limiting factor, if we either reach memory limits or if we have to re-initialize communication relations in every time step. In this contribution, we remove two remaining bottlenecks: (i) We base the neighborhood search between mesh entities of two solvers on a tree data structure to avoid quadratic complexity, and (ii) we replace the sequential gather-scatter comparison of both mesh partitions by a two-level approach that first compares bounding boxes around mesh partitions in a sequential manner, subsequently establishes pairwise communication between processes of the two solvers, and finally compares mesh partitions between connected processes in parallel. We show, that the two-level initialization method is fives times faster than the old one-level scheme on 24,567 CPU-cores using a mesh with 628,898 vertices. In addition, the two-level scheme is able to handle much larger computational meshes, since the central mesh communication of the one-level scheme is replaced with a fully point-to-point mesh communication scheme.
Open Access
Enhancing quasi-newton acceleration for fluid-structure interaction
(2022) Davis, Kyle; Schulte, Miriam; Uekermann, Benjamin
We propose two enhancements of quasi-Newton methods used to accelerate coupling iterations for partitioned fluid-structure interaction. Quasi-Newton methods have been established as flexible, yet robust, efficient and accurate coupling methods of multi-physics simulations in general. The coupling library preCICE provides several variants, the so-called IQN-ILS method being the most commonly used. It uses input and output differences of the coupled solvers collected in previous iterations and time steps to approximate Newton iterations. To make quasi-Newton methods both applicable for parallel coupling (where these differences contain data from different physical fields) and to provide a robust approach for re-using information, a combination of information filtering and scaling for the different physical fields is typically required. This leads to good convergence, but increases the cost per iteration. We propose two new approaches - pre-scaling weight monitoring and a new, so-called QR3 filter, to substantially improve runtime while not affecting convergence quality. We evaluate these for a variety of fluid-structure interaction examples. Results show that we achieve drastic speedups for the pure quasi-Newton update steps. In the future, we intend to apply the methods also to volume-coupled scenarios, where these gains can be decisive for the feasibility of the coupling approach.
Open Access
Umgang mit Forschungssoftware an der Universität Stuttgart
(2020) Flemisch, Bernd; Hermann, Sibylle; Holm, Christian; Mehl, Miriam; Reina, Guido; Uekermann, Benjamin; Boehringer, David; Ertl, Thomas; Grad, Jean-Noël; Iglezakis, Dorothea; Jaust, Alexander; Koch, Timo; Seeland, Anett; Weeber, Rudolf; Weik, Florian; Weishaupt, Kilian
Wir empfehlen die Einrichtung einer Organisationseinheit Forschungssoftware-Entwicklung an der Universität Stuttgart und eines daran angegliederten Stellenpools von Research Software Engineers (RSEs). Dazu schlagen wir Maßnahmen zur Schaffung und Finanzierung entsprechender neuer RSE-Stellen, zur Integration bestehender Stellen sowie zur Gewinnung und Förderung geeigneter Personen vor. RSEs sind Personen, die sich um Konzeption, Organisation, Implementierung, Testen, Dokumentation und Wartung von Forschungssoftware kümmern. Die institutionelle Förderung von Forschungssoftware-Entwicklung ist notwendig, da die Bedeutung von Software für die Forschung und Anforderungen an die entsprechende Software, u.a. durch die DFG, stetig zunimmt.