Consortium for Open Multiphysics

Technical Approach

Here will be described or linked the specific technical approaches, designs, and implementations pursued by the consortium. Eventually, there will be multiple open, active projects associated with multiphysics systems, parallel IO, visualization, and UX developments. Currently, the only active development project is the infrastructure for software integration; the description of which follows on the remainder of this page.

Software Integration Infrastructure

The broad overarching goal in this project is to establish an infrastructure wherein multiphysics technologies can be rapidly conceived, deployed, studied, and ultimately utilized, all by the domain scientist(s) seeking to accomplish the simulation. A key step in realizing this goal is to specify, develop, and implement an open infrastructure for general software integration in the HPC environment. This infrastructure will provide the technology for existing applications to exchange data and share computational methods, as well as a mechanism for control flow orchestration. Once a solid foundation of general software integration technology is established, simulation and multiphysics-specific constructs can be formed on the integration substrate.

A common infrastructure for software integration will enable commercial entities to provide integration-ready software using existing in-house technologies while protecting their intellectual property at a fraction of the current cost. Industrial, academic and government researchers will directly benefit from the capabilities provided under a standardized integration interface since it will facilitate rapid prototyping of multiphysics simulation software and enable the integration of existing software with new open and commercial developments.

The initial technical effort in this area has been to describe and implement a particular approach for parallel application integration and partitioned multiphysics coupling in which each domain and its respective specialized simulation application is centrally interfaced and control flow is centrally orchestrated.

System Design Overview

Here we will try to present a mostly implementation-independent description of an architecture for general software integration in the HPC environment. The system design presented here is not new or unique to this effort. This approach leverages a dozen years of HPC software integration research, multiphysics coupling, and simulation experience gained through the design and development of the University of Illinois DOE ASC Center multiphysics simulation application, Rocstar, and observation of other efforts in this area. Very similar architectures can be observed in the PreCICE package, MCT, and in the LIME environment. The goal of this effort is to learn from these and other similar systems, extracting, generalizing (and hopefully standardizing) a free and open infrastructure for general software integration in the HPC environment; allowing both existing, as well as developing applications to stand ready to participate in integrated software systems. The links below lead to discussions on the architectures of the infrastructure itself and of an integrated application using the infrastructure.

System Architecture
Integrated Application Architecture

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