ExaSolvers - Extreme Scale Solvers for Coupled Systems

Supercomputes today already have tens to hundreds of thousands of cores. It is expected that systems capable of achieving Exaflop performance (that is 1018 floating point operations each second) will emerge by the end of decade and that these computers will feature more than 100 million cores and probably up to 1 billion. To efficiently use such extreme numbers of cores in scientific computing requires new innovative mathematical methods that combine optimal complexity with a massive degree of concurrency. Also, power consumption will become a critical issue on exascale systems, mandating the development of algorithms that are not only fast but also efficient in terms of required electric energy. The project deals with the development of novel numerical schemes that can tackle these issues in order to prepare for the exascale era. Exasolvers combines state-of-the-art algorithms from different fields of numerical mathematics to develop a new software framework that can efficiently utilize upcoming high-performance computing architectures. The SNF-funded part of the project in particular deals with the development of a new method that provides parallelization in the time direction, in addition to parallelization in space by decomposing the problem into sub-problems. The benchmark problem of the project is the numerical simulation of permeation of human skin, an application that is of great interest for example for the development of pharmaceuticals. In order to be able to run numerical simulations that actually resolve all scales arising in this problem, exascale computing capabilities will be required.