EoCoE-assisted boost for HPC-CFD modelling of wind resource assessment
Improving HPC-CFD software for wind resource assessment with the help of EoCoE
BSC collaborates with Iberdrola on wind resource assessment. As part of this collaboration, the CFD version of code ALYA developed at BSC has been adapted so that Iberdrola can use it as an alternative to commercial software for wind farm assessment. This has several advantages, since the wind farm assessment tool is based on ALYA, a code designed to run efficiently on supercomputers.
This means that simulations can be run on thousands of processors, allowing much finer meshes to be used than those possible with a commercial code. Since BSC is the developer of ALYA, new features and modules can be rapidly implemented and tested. RANS turbulence models are the standard approach for wind farm assessment but recently LES models are also being considered since they become feasible with the advent of Exascale computers. With the help of HPC experts from the Energy Oriented Center of Excellence (EoCoE), the code has been optimised to increase its node level performance. Computational savings of up to 38% have been obtained in the assembly of the matrix for the Navier Stokes equations. Moreover, work is being carried out with linear algebra solver experts from EoCoE to evaluate two iterative solvers (Maphys and AGMG). For some LES cases, CPU-time reductions of more than 50% in the solver CPU time with AGMG have already been obtained.
