Heterogeneous CPU/GPU co-execution of CFD simulations on the POWER9 architecture: Application to airplane aerodynamics.

One of the main challenges of civil aviation is the construction of more efficient airplanes in terms of fuel consumption and noise emissions. Research and development on the aerodynamics of the full airplane are one of the priorities established by the Advisory Council for Aeronautics Research in Europe. In this context, high fidelity simulations are one of the main tools for the design of innovative solutions. Such simulations are based on accurate numerical algorithms, as well as advanced LES turbulence models, which have high computational requirements. Consequently, significant research efforts on the computational and algorithmic aspects are required to unlock the computing power of leading-edge pre-Exascale systems. In this paper, we explain the approach implemented into a CFD simulation code, Alya, to achieve these physical, numerical and computational We present a global parallelization strategy to fully exploit the different levels of parallelism proposed by modern architectures, together with a novel co-execution model for the concurrent exploitation of both the CPU and GPU, targeting the maximum efficiency at the node level. The latter is based on a multi-code co-execution approach together with a dynamic load balancing mechanism. Assessment of the performance of all the proposed strategies has been carried out on the cutting edge POWER9 architecture.