C2S@Exa - Computer and Computational Sciences at Exascale: Main/Home Page

The C2S@Exa INRIA large-scale initiative is concerned with the development of numerical modeling methodologies that fully exploit the processing capabilities of modern massively parallel architectures in the context of a number of selected applications related to important scientific and technological challenges for the quality and the security of life in our society. At the current state of the art in technologies and methodologies, a multidisciplinary approach is required to overcome the challenges raised by the development of highly scalable numerical simulation software that can exploit computing platforms offering several hundreds of thousands of cores. Hence, the main objective of the C2S@Exa INRIA large-scale initiative is the establishment of a continuum of expertise in the computer science and numerical mathematics domains, by gathering researchers from INRIA project-teams whose research and development activities are tightly linked to high performance computing issues in these domains. More precisely, this collaborative effort involves computer scientists that are experts of programming models, environments and tools for harnessing massively parallel systems, algorithmists that propose algorithms and contribute to generic libraries and core solvers in order to take benefit from all the parallelism levels with the main goal of optimal scaling on very large numbers of computing entities and, numerical mathematicians that are studying numerical schemes and scalable solvers for systems of partial differential equations in view of the simulation of very large-scale problems.

A small number of scientific and technological challenges have been selected as the main targets for the research and development activities undertaken in the project. Two application domains have been considered at the beginning of the project namely, nuclear energy production and radioactive waste management. For these application domains, associated use cases have been defined in conjunction with external partners for the demonstration of the possibilities of the high performance numerical computing methodologies that are developed in the project. The two external partners currently involved in the project are ANDRA (French National Agency for Radioactive Waste Management) and CEA-IRFM (French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission).