Introducing FireX: A High-Performance Computing Branch of the NIST Fire Dynamics Simulator

The Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) is a low-Mach, large-eddy simulation code specifically tuned for fire protection engineering applications. In this talk, we will explore recent developments in FDS to utilize GPU (graphics processing unit) acceleration and scalable distributed memory computing. Modern computing hardware is driving a shift back to specialized coding in order to take advantage of the potential acceleration offered by large numbers of GPU cores. All of the leadership class supercomputers in the U.S. now rely on GPU hardware. A new development branch of FDS, called FireX, uses the PETSc (Portable Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation) li- brary developed by Argonne National Laboratory to solve the pressure Pois- son equation and Sundials (SUite of Nonlinear and DIfferential/ALgebraic Equation Solvers) developed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to solve stiff systems of ordinary differential equations for complex chemi- cal kinetics. Both solvers may be configured to run on GPU. Preliminary tests of the code running on Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (NVIDIA GPU) are presented with lessons learned about oversubscription of MPI processes to the GPU cores. Finally, we will present results from FireX with detailed chemistry applied to the Smyth slot burner to predict carbon monoxide concentrations and the University of Maryland line burner to model flame extinction.