Podcast: ‘Let’s Talk Exascale’ – Update to the MFEM Element Library for Broader GPU Support

In the latest in the Let’s Talk Exascale podcast series, Tzanio Kolev of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory describes the work at the Center for Efficient Exascale Discretizations (CEED), one of six co-design centers within the U.S. Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project.

Discretization methods divide a large simulation into smaller components in preparation for computer analysis. CEED is ECP’s hub for partial differential equation discretizations on unstructured grids, providing user-friendly software, mathematical expertise, community standards, benchmarks, and miniapps as well as coordination between the applications, hardware vendors, and Software Technology (ST) efforts in ECP.

CEED recently released version 4.1 of its MFEM (modular finite element methods) library, which introduces features important for the nation’s first exascale supercomputers.

Tzanio Kolev, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Kolev, principal investigator of CEED and MFEM project leader, said MFEM is open-source scientific software that is used in computer modeling and simulation of nuclear reactors; subsurface flow for oil exploration; the strength of buildings, bridges, and engineering parts; additive manufacturing; electromagnetic devices like antennas, tokamaks, and MRI machines; climate phenomena; and the human body (the heart, for example). MFEM can be placed in a variety of codes to make their simulations more accurate and more performant on large-scale high-performance computing (HPC) systems.

In the latest in the Let’s Talk Exascale podcast series, Tzanio Kolev of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory describes the work at the Center for Efficient Exascale Discretizations (CEED), one of six co-design centers within the U.S. Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project.

The conversation covers the value that MFEM brings to a variety of codes, the broadening of support to next-generation GPUs and to libCEED: the CEED operator evaluation library, improvements to the meshing and discretization algorithms, the addition of 18 new examples of mini-apps, and integrations with many other ECP software packages.

To check out the entire Let’s Talk Exascale podcast series, go to: https://www.exascaleproject.org/podcast/

Source: Scott Gibson