I-Corps: On Demand Simulations in the Cloud of the Equations of Mathematical Physics

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Numerical simulations, data-driven approaches and computer modeling are used more widely than ever, and have become an essential part of the creation of new products in diverse industries (mineral exploration, drug development, automotive, aerospace, finance, electronics, photonics, mechanical design and development, and defense). Under previous NSF funding the researchers have developed extremely fast approaches based on the fast multipole method to do simulations in acoustics, fluid mechanics and electromagnetics. They have also developed parallel approaches to accelerate their algorithms via the cluster hardware accelerated by graphic processors. The simulation industry is currently a niche industry, with several relatively small companies serving different industries with specific pieces of software. However, it is ripe for disruption and broadening - by taking advantage of advances in infrastructure - cloud and heterogeneous GPU accelerated computing; and the development of software engineering approaches that have shown that many traditional tasks that were done locally on a user's computer in the past, can now be delivered as a service using the network and the cloud infrastructures that are widely available. In the proposed I-Corps project the proposed team will investigate the possibility that such an approach may be commercially viable.This I-Corps team has already been requested by a number of commercial entities for software simulations services for simulation of electromagnetic and acoustical scattering from complex objects. Through the I-Corps process, this team will be able to place these requests in context, and develop a larger plan for creating a successful company. The team will understand the steps needed to develop a service around high performance computing (HPC) methods and capabilities available via cloud computing, the use of advanced co-processors, such as graphics processors, and advanced scalable algorithms, such as the fast multipole methods. Based on the feed-back received in the I-Corps customer interview process, the team can add a number of capabilities to the codes, such as their efficient mapping into distributed computing systems, where each computing node consists of several CPU cores and one (1) or several GPUs. At the end of the I-Corps project, the team plans to provide a demonstration in which the proposed software is used to provide high performance cloud computing and interfacing for some basic problems in electrostatics and acoustics. The selection of the demonstration application will be guided by the customer discovery efforts undertaken in the I-Corps curriculum. The key outcome of this development will be a demo that can subsequently be applied and built upon to show off our technology to potential customers and investors.