So far, much effort has been invested in building a community around the topic of renewable energy modelling. These efforts have paid off, as witnessed by the organistion of a session at the European HPC Summit, three face-to-face meetings, three performance evaluation workshops and many other dedicated events. The matrix structure of the project has facilitated strong collaborations between HPC experts of WP1 and application experts of various energy fields (WP2-5). The EoCoE pan-European network is now fully operational and capable of providing interdisciplinary expertise to external clients.
For the transversal basis (WP1), an important achievement was, in collaboration with the POP Centre of Excellence, to implement a rigorous evaluation procedure for application performance. This benchmarking process gives a clear view of the application performance in several key areas (I/O, communications, memory, …) and establishes its precise status when EoCoE experts start to examine it. The impact of each code modification during the optimization process can then be seamlessly monitored and the impact of subsequent support activity quantitatively assessed. It constitutes an important asset to for pushing EoCoE applications towards exascale.
Several important results were obtained in WP2 (Meteorology for energy). For example, the software Solar_Nowcast providing the short-term forecast of global irradiation from ground-based or satellite images was greatly optimized. Optimization efforts reduced the run time by a factor of 10 and enables the application to meet the real time constraints imposed by data acquisition. This work was performed in collaboration with a team from EdF R&D and constitutes a strong step towards using the code in the EdF operational production chain.
Material science (WP3) is also a fundamental issue for many energy applications and often requires substantial computing resources. Therefore, a lot of effort was dedicated to improve models and numerical approaches for the first-principles, atomistic description of materials. Promising results were also obtained for perovskite solar cells, a good example of where energy materials research is essential to promote sustainable alternative to silicon for renewable energy generation by solar power.
Concerning energy hydrology (WP4), the EoCoE teams are involved both in geothermal energy and in hydropower monitoring. In both domains, the numerical production models were again optimized significantly, as for example the I/O of the SHEMAT-suite which was improved by almost two orders of magnitude. These tools combined with the creation (or access) to large and pertinent data-set are enabling tangible progress in the assessment of the influence of climate change on the hydropower production in the Alps or on the geothermal potential in the region around the city of Geilenkirchen.
Controlled nuclear fusion (WP5) is already a very massive user of HPC. Simulations at ITER relevant parameters are not yet achievable but advancing toward this objective is one of EoCoE’s goals. Innovative meshing techniques were developed to properly simulate turbulence and MHD instabilities in tokamaks. Efficient coupling between kinetic and fluid codes were also studied in detail. This coupling is absolutely necessary in order to simulate the full tokamaks including the influence of the vessel wall, and raises important issues, both on the technical and physical sides.
