ELEMENT - the Exascale Mesh Network
ELEMENT addresses the high priority use case of meshing for the Exascale (i.e. ensuring that meshes are of sufficient quality to represent Exascale problems and can be partitioned efficiently to minimise load imbalance) as well as meshing at the Exascale (i.e. creating highly scalable solutions that will be able to exploit extreme levels of parallelism).
The meshes required for Exascale simulations, under which we will aim to model problems with extreme geometric complexity and levels of refinement, will necessarily be very large with 109 cells and above, and contain cells that may differ in size by many orders of magnitude to faithfully resolve the underlying physics at their appropriate scales. Meshing and geometry management remain a significant bottleneck for complex applications on HPC platforms, posing a challenging obstacle that must be overcome to enable Exascale simulations. From a technical perspective, these issues include (but are not limited to) improved geometric handling, mesh adaptation and optimisation, intelligent meshing, automation and robustness, all within a large distributed environment that lies outside of our current capabilities.
ELEMENT’s objectives are threefold:
- Building a community around meshing practice by establishing a collaborative network;
- Undertaking proof of concept studies, with prototype implementations of two target challenges; and
- Publishing a Vision Paper and strategic research agenda covering the full meshing workflow, from mesh generation to adaptation, partitioning and visualisation.
ELEMENT is led by EPCC, the supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh, and run in partnership with the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, the University of Exeter and Swansea University.
ELEMENT is funded by UKRI as an ExCALIBUR High Priority Use Case, grant reference EP/V001345/1.