4th EGEE User Forum/OGF 25 and OGF Europe's 2nd International Event

Enabling parallel Elmer for EGEE

3 Mar 2009, 18:15

5m

Foyer (Le Ciminiere, Catania, Sicily, Italy)

Poster Scientific results obtained using grid technology Poster session

Speaker

Dr Ivan Degtyarenko (CSC - IT Center for Science)

Description

Elmer, the Finite Element software, has been installed and successfully used by ESR VO grid users for solving a number of multiphysical problems. Elmer is an open source simulation software developed and supported by CSC - the IT center for science (Finland). The recent parallel version installation of the software based on the Message Passing Interface makes solving large computational problems on the EGEE infrastructure possible.

Keywords

Finite Element Method, Earth Science, fluid dynamics, Elmer, parallel, MPI

Impact

A special application field of Elmer is Earth Sciences and in particular ice dynamics simulations. With Elmer solving the unaltered set of Stokes equations (see e.g. Zwinger et. al.), it is especially suited for applications that cannot be dealt with the commonly applied Shallow Ice Assumption. In turn, higher resolutions are needed rising demand for larger parallel computations. Part of the simulation has been done by means of Elmer with all its ice dynamics application specific modules installed on EGEE under the ESR VO.
Being a multi-physics code, Elmer is not restricted to Earth Sciences. Other applications are for instance Microfluidics (Sikanen et al.), micromechanical electronical devices - MEMS (Pursula et al.), Hemodynamics (Järvinen et al.) and industrial process simulation, such as crystal growth (Savolainen et al.).

References: http://www.csc.fi/english/pages/elmer/publications

Conclusions and Future Work

The CSC - the IT center for science attempts to increase the Elmer grid users number. We also encourage grid users to extend the area of Elmer applications.
CSC will continue Elmer development providing up-to-date software and support for the grid users.

URL for further information

http://www.csc.fi/elmer

Detailed analysis

Elmer includes physical models of fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, electromagnetics, heat transfer and acoustics, for example. These are described by partial differential equations which Elmer solves by the Finite Element Method (FEM). Computer simulations in the above mentioned fields as well as others where the method is applicable can be solved on EGEE.
The current grid installation includes both preinstalled serial and parallel versions defined as GlueHostApplicationSoftwareRunTimeEnvironment: VO-esr-elmer-<VERSION> and available for the all Earth Science community authorized users under ESR VO. The software is installed into $VO_ESR_SW_DIR/elmer.
Currently, two CSC CEs have Elmer software preinstalled. For the rest CSC provides the source code freely available from the http://www.csc.fi/english/pages/elmer/sources.