MFC 5.0: An exascale many-physics flow solver
Many problems of interest in engineering, medicine, and the fundamental sciences rely on high-fidelity flow simulation, making performant computational fluid dynamics solvers a mainstay of the open-source software community. A previous work (Bryngelson et al., Comp. Phys. Comm. (2021)) published MFC 3.0 with numerous physical features, numerics, and scalability. MFC 5.0 is a marked update to MFC 3.0, including a broad set of well-established and novel physical models and numerical methods, and the introduction of XPU acceleration. We exhibit state-of-the-art performance and ideal scaling on the first two exascale supercomputers, OLCF Frontier and LLNL El Capitan. Combined with MFC's single-accelerator performance, MFC achieves exascale computation in practice. New physical features include the immersed boundary method, N-fluid phase change, Euler--Euler and Euler--Lagrange sub-grid bubble models, fluid-structure interaction, hypo- and hyper-elastic materials, chemically reacting flow, two-material surface tension, magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), and more. Numerical techniques now represent the current state-of-the-art, including general relaxation characteristic boundary conditions, WENO variants, Strang splitting for stiff sub-grid flow features, and low Mach number treatments. Weak scaling to tens of thousands of GPUs on OLCF Summit and Frontier and LLNL El Capitan sees efficiencies within 5% of ideal to their full system sizes. Strong scaling results for a 16-times increase in device count show parallel efficiencies over 90% on OLCF Frontier. MFC's software stack has improved, including continuous integration, ensuring code resilience and correctness through over 300 regression tests; metaprogramming, reducing code length and maintaining performance portability; and code generation for computing chemical reactions.
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