Success Story: Optimizing industrial particle processes through simulation

NCC presenting the success story

EuroCC Belgium is Belgium’s National Competence Centre (NCC) in the area of high-performance computing (HPC) and high-performance data analytics (HPDA) and coordinates activities in all HPC-related fields and serves as a reference contact point on HPC/HPDA/AI at a national level.

EuroCC Belgium is a consortium consisting of the following partners: Cenaero, CECI, Innoviris Brussel en het Vlaams Computer Centrum.

Industrial Organizations Involved:

The simulation software Mpacts can simulate the behaviour of a large number of particles through machines enabling the improvement of the machine by testing designs in a software environment before actually having to build a physical machine. This way is much more time-efficient and cost-reducing. Mpacts uses the Discrete Element Method (DEM) to understand, predict and solve industrial problems. To simulate a lot of particles, a lot of computational resources are needed. To perform simulations for clients the organization uses the VSC infrastructure.  

Technical/scientific Challenge:

More particles can only be simulated in shorter time spans by making use of the parallel resources available. For ‘shared memory’ parallelism such as TBB or GP-GPU, the bottleneck for this type of simulation is typically memory bandwidth and memory latency. When switching to an MPI parallel acceleration, across multiple compute nodes, the main challenge becomes an efficient dynamic domain decomposition as the particles move across the simulated domain.

Business Impact/Benefits:

Simon Vanmarcke (Mpacts): “Using the supercomputing infrastructure of the VSC matches our usage pattern very well. Typically, we require ‘bursts’ of computational power when performing simulations for clients. It would be unfeasible and inefficient to purchase the required computational power in-house as it would be costly to do so and idle most of the time. Working with the VSC enables us to deliver results with ‘industrial turnaround times’ at a cost that scales only with how much actual simulation work is done, not with the peak resources used. A real game-changer.”

Solution:

To make the simulations faster, several paths can be taken. First, the software itself can be made more efficient and thus faster. Second, more computational resources can be used, and acceleration hardware such as GPUs can be used.

Simon Vanmarcke (Mpacts): “As a striking example of the first strategy, the experts at VSC recommended we sort the particles so that particles close in (simulated) space are also close together in computer memory. This increases the likelihood for cache hits and decreases the overall memory bandwidth.”

The effect on the computational time is illustrated in the YouTube movie for single-core performance. In GPU-accelerated simulations, the effect is much more pronounced as the memory throughput on these devices is even more of a bottleneck. 

More particles can only be simulated in shorter time spans by using the parallel resources available. For ‘shared memory’ parallelism such as TBB or GP-GPU, the bottleneck for this type of simulation is typically memory bandwidth and memory latency. When switching to an MPI parallel acceleration across multiple compute nodes, the main challenge becomes an efficient dynamic domain decomposition as the particles move across the simulated domain. Additionally, the VSC makes it possible for Mpacts to obtain very large amounts of computational power which have GPU acceleration available.

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