PreDem -- Democratization of the Coupling Library preCICE

高性能计算的一类越来越重要的应用是多物理场和多代码场景。它们的特征在于基本模型，该模型通常由物理耦合的不同类型的方程组组成。典型的例子是航空航天工程或医疗应用中流体流动和弹性变形结构之间的相互作用，或者冷却或加热系统中流动和刚性结构之间的热耦合。建立这些复杂的模型是为了确保非常高的精度，这意味着我们必须在相应的数值模拟中确保非常高的精度。这需要在高性能计算平台上运行模拟。为了应对由此产生的挑战，我们开发了一个名为preCICE的库，它可以实现独立（甚至是黑盒）单物理场求解器的高效，鲁棒和并行耦合。这种方法导致非常短的软件开发时间和非常快的模拟。 preCICE处于原型阶段。它已经被耦合到各种社区代码，如OpenFOAM，Calculix或ANSYS Fluent，但也与一些学术机构的内部代码。preCICE是在LGPL 3许可下开源的。在过去的几年里，在科学项目中使用preCICE的请求显着增加-在过去的两年里有十几个研究所。微创耦合是许多应用中不断增长的需求。然而，在当前状态下，在没有开发团队支持的情况下使用preCICE几乎不可行。该项目的目标是获得关于如何使研究软件可供非专家使用的最佳做法。这是一个未解决的问题，不仅对于preCICE，而且对于一般的学术软件，通常提供高度复杂的最先进的方法，然而，由于缺乏可用性，社区无法充分利用。主要原因是开发团队可用性改进的时间有限，我们的目标是提供基础设施，方法，指南和经验，允许其他开发团队以更快，更容易的方式实现代码的良好可用性。我们实现这一目标的耦合库preCICE的一个示例性的研究。然后，可以将导出的最佳实践应用于其他研究软件。研究软件的民主化，即，使非专家也能使用这一软件包括几个方面，我们将其分为四类，在项目工作包中加以处理：基础设施（研究软件应易于获得和设置）、可持续性（研究软件的长期可持续性必须得到保证）、可用性（研究软件应易于使用）、推广（研究软件应为人所知和值得信赖）。

An increasingly important class of applications for high-performance computing are multi-physics and multi-code scenarios. They are characterised by the underlying model that typically consists of different types of systems of equations that are physically coupled. Typical examples are interactions between fluid flow and elastic deforming structures in aerospace engineering or medical applications or the thermal coupling between flow and rigid structures in cooling or heating systems. These complex models are established in order to ensure a very high accuracy which implies that we have to ensure a comparably high accuracy in the respective numerical simulation. This requires running the simulation on high performance computing platforms. To target the resulting challenges, we have developed a library called preCICE, which enables the efficient, robust, and parallel coupling of separate (even black-box) single-physics solvers. This approach leads to very short software development times and very fast simulations. preCICE is in the stage of a prototype. It has been coupled to various community codes such as OpenFOAM, Calculix, or ANSYS Fluent, but also with in-house codes of several academic institutions. preCICE is open-source under the LGPL3 license. During the last years, the requests for using preCICE in scientific projects increased significantly -- a dozen institutes during the last two years. Minimally invasive coupling is an ever-growing need for many applications. At the current state, however, the use of preCICE without support from the developer team is hardly feasible. The objective of the project is to derive best-practices on how to make a research software usable for non-experts. This is an unsolved issue not only for preCICE but for academic software in general that typically provides highly sophisticated state-of-the-art methods, which, however, can not be fully exploited by the community due to a lack of usability. With the main reason being limited time for usability improvements in the developer teams, our objective is to provide infrastructure, methods, guidelines and experiences that allow other developer teams to achieve a good usability of their code in a faster and easier way. We realize this objective by an exemplary study of the coupling library preCICE. The derived best practices can then be applied to other research software. Democratization of a research software, i.e., making it usable for non-experts, encompasses several aspects, which we group in four categories tackled in the projects work packages: Infrastructure (the research software should be easy to get and easy to set up), sustainability (the long-term sustainability of the research software has to be guaranteed), usability (the research software should be easy to use), outreach (the research software should be known and trusted).