"HiLeMMS": High-Level Mesoscale Modelling System

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Mesoscale modelling plays a very important role in addressing a broad range of engineering and science challenges involving multiscale and multiphysics fluid flows. To accurately simulate these innovative flows, it is necessary to have a computer modelling system capable of efficiently managing complex geometries and data structures, and harnessing fully high performance computing power brought by emerging hardware architectures. However, these prove to be two major obstacles: while there is no single method of geometry description and data structure suitable for all flows, as well as competing computing platforms requiring different programming techniques, it is very time-consuming if not impossible for a single research group to develop such a system that can easily switch between different geometry descriptions and different hardware platforms. To tackle this challenge, we propose to develop a high-level mesoscale modelling system (HiLeMMS) on the basis of existing infrastructures. There have been successful efforts exploiting a high-level abstraction approach to hide the details of parallelism and handling a single method of geometry description and data structure, such as the Oxford Parallel Library for Structured-mesh solvers (OPS) for multi-block applications from Oxford University and the Chombo library for adaptive mesh refinement from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Importantly, these libraries will support major emerging hardware architectures. Therefore, we will build HiLeMMS by constructing a high-level abstraction layer specifically for the lattice Boltzmann method on top of these libraries. In this way, HiLeMMS will hide and automate the programming required for utilising existing libraries, and speed up application development. The application developer will only need to write code once, and then will enjoy the flexibility of switching libraries with minimal effort to obtain the capability required for the scientific problem.The lattice Boltzmann code in the DL_MESO package (DL_MESO_LBE) will be re-engineered using HiLeMMS so that the code can have the capability of managing different geometry and data structures as well as efficient execution on emerging hardware platforms. Benefiting from the high-level framework, we will further develop a number of new functionalities into the package, extending the capabilities to model non-continuum gas flows, fluid-structure interactions and multiphase flows.