NEK User Meeting – High-Order CFD and Exascale HPC at JSC

From 29-31 July 2024, Jülich Supercomputing Centre hosted the NEK User Meeting on the campus of Forschungszentrum Jülich under perfect weather conditions. The two and a half days were characterized by world-class presentations from the fields of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and high-performance computing (HPC), complemented by social activities, networking opportunities and hands-on sessions. In total, up to 50 participants from all over the world took part in this hybrid event and dealt with applications from a wide range of topics from turbulence, fusion and combustion to visualization and modular computing.

The NEK community performs highly accurate fluid mechanics simulations with the codes nek5000 and nekRS, some of which are coupled with other multi-physics effects. In the last two years, nekRS in particular has become one of the major use cases on the JUWELS Booster and is used in numerous HPC projects. In addition to the large number of projects, the size of the simulations performed makes nekRS an important (pre-)exascale use case. As an example, the recent high-fidelity simulations of Rayleigh Bénard Convection required more than 800 JUWELS Booster nodes for more than 24 hours of runtime. Currently, several nekRS applications are being prepared for the first European exascale supercomputer JUPITER.

Contact: Mathis Bode