CODA: Next generation of industrial aerodynamic simulation code

NextSim partners, as fundamental European players in Aeronautics and Simulation, recognise that there is a need to increase the capabilities of current Computational Fluid Dynamics tools for aeronautical design by re-engineering them for extreme-scale parallel computing platforms.

The backbone of NextSim is centred on the fact that, today, the capabilities of leading-edge emerging HPC architectures are not fully exploited by industrial simulation tools.

Current state-of-the-art industrial solvers do not take sufficient advantage of the immense capabilities of new hardware architectures, such as streaming processors or many-core platforms.

A combined research effort focusing on algorithms and HPC is the only way to make possible to develop and advance simulation tools to meet the needs of the European aeronautical industry.

NextSim will focus on the development of the numerical flow solver CODA (Finite Volume and high-order discontinuous Galerkin schemes), that will be the new reference solver for aerodynamic applications inside AIRBUS group, having a significant impact in the aeronautical market. To demonstrate NextSim market impact, AIRBUS has defined a series of market relevant problems.

The numerical simulation of those problems is still a challenge for the aeronautical industry and their solution, at a required accuracy and an affordable computational costs, is still not possible with the current industrial solvers.

Following this idea, three additional working areas are proposed in NextSim: algorithms for numerical efficiency, algorithms for data management and the efficiency implementation of those algorithms in the most advanced HPC platforms.

Finally, NextSim will provide access to project results trough the “mini-apps” concept, small pieces of software, seeking synergies with open-source components, which demonstrate the use of the novel mathematical methods and algorithms developed in CODA but that will be freely distributed to the scientific community.