Scalability Post – Alya

Each week on the InSilico World and CompBioMed Slack Scalability channel one of our research group outlines the work that they have done to scale their codes. We are happy that 60 experts have already joined this channel and we would like more interaction and discussions taking place on the channel around the codes being described and more general help and advice for our members. Here we give a short outline of each of these codes and we hope it encourages people to view the full posts on the channel and increase the discussions in this field.

The first post was on December 7th, in which Mariano Vazquez from Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) posted information on the Alya code and the work towards exascale development of the code:

Alya is the multiphysics multiscale code from BSC, specifically designed for running in an efficient way on supercomputers. Multiscale coupling represents a major concern not only from a purely computational viewpoint, but also from the algorithmic side [2, 3].
BSC has observed that the best ways to face this in a scalable way is only possible by preparing the code a long time before attacking the problem, engineering it in a way to allow it to cover as many of the potential problems as possible. It is very important to design a computational strategy in which the different couplings can be seen as belonging to families, gathering as many  common ideas as possible in “coupling patterns” or computational and algorithmic stencils which can be replicated for the different members of the family…

For a full report, please access and join the InSilico World and CompBioMed Slack Scalability channel by following the link.