HPC-Based CFD for Offshore Renewable Energy Workshop

The rapid growth and accessibility of new and increasingly powerful high-performance computing (HPC) technologies and hardware can enable the use of high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes based on first-principles, such as the Navier-Stokes equations, for substantially improving renewable energy power plant analysis and design, thus greatly improving power generation effectiveness while minimizing potential environmental damage. In offshore renewable energy, this requires reliably modeling the flow past wind and tidal turbines, as well as the complex physics of atmospheric flows and marine currents. The use of high-fidelity CFD for these applications relies on the massive and efficient use of HPC due to the large size of these real-world simulations. Augmenting state-of-art CFD codes with the latest HPC technologies to enable their effective use for these problems, while maintaining user-friendliness and achieving an optimal computational performance, poses significant scientific and technological challenges; addressing these challenges requires tight team-work of Engineers, Physicists of the Environment, and Scientific Computing experts. Learn more.