Two researchers from Argonne National Laboratory – Shashi Aithal, a computational scientist in the Computing, Environment and Life Sciences directorate, and Stefan Wild, a computational mathematician in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division – received the HPC Innovation Excellence Award at SC15.
The award, presented by International Data Corporation, recognizes noteworthy achievements by users of HPC technologies. The program’s stated goals are to showcase return on investment and scientific success stories involving HPC; to help other users better understand the benefits of adopting HPC and justify HPC investments, especially for small- and medium-sized businesses; to demonstrate the value of HPC to funding bodies and politicians; and to expand public support for increased HPC investments.
The award-winning project involved development of ACCOLADES (Advanced Concurrent Computing for Large-scale Dynamic Engine Simulations), a scalable workflow framework that enables automotive design engineers to exploit high-performance computing for complementing dynamometer (or “dyno”) testing. On large-scale computer platforms, ACCOLADES can compute the performance and emissions of an entire fleet of cars at real-time speeds concurrently. The tool also enables detailed analyses of the voluminous data generated from these computations.
“ACCOLADES can be viewed as running hundreds or thousands of dynos simultaneously,” said Aithal. “It greatly streamlines the workflow management of conducting large-scale parametric sweeps for generating performance maps of engines, thus accelerating the design and development process.
According to Aithal, “The power of large-scale computing enables ACCOLADES to open up new vistas in engine design, development,and product planning. For instance, engine designers can use ACCOLADES to optimize engine design for the next-generation of fuels and fuel additives while policy makers can evaluate their effect on emissions and their role in smart city planning.”
For an explanation of the IDC goals and awards program, see the HPC User Forum website.
The paper “ACCOLADES: A scalable workflow framework for large-scale simulation and analyses of automotive engines,” pp. 87-95, appears in vol. 9137 of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, 2015.