Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory are partnering with Convergent Science, Inc. (CSI), to speed up a key piece of modeling and simulation software to ensure those cycles are used as effectively as possible, reducing product development time and resulting in better engines and savings for consumers. The scale of the speed gains were recently demonstrated when researchers ran the largest engine simulation to date on more than 4,000 computer cores.

The research is part of Argonne's Virtual Engine Research Institute and Fuels Initiative (VERIFI), which is working with CSI to optimize the company's CONVERGE code, a CFD software program widely used in industry to conduct modeling and simulation for engine design. While the effort has been ongoing for more than two years, it has recently moved into a code optimization phase that is showing dramatic gains.

"Our latest round of optimization has yielded a three-fold increase in speed, which correlates directly into faster design of better engines," said Janardhan Kodavasal, a postdoctoral appointee who led the optimization work along with with Marta Garcia Martinez, an assistant computational scientist, and Kevin Harms, a senior software developer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. "The unique High Performance Computing resources we have available at Argonne allowed us to make great progress in a short amount of time."

Read more in Argonne National Lab's article, VERIFI code optimization yields three-fold increase in engine simulation speed.