Multi-physics simulations using a hierarchical interchangeable software interface

TL;DR

This paper presents a versatile, efficient framework for connecting scientific simulation programs through a unified, parallel interface that simplifies module integration, enhances computational flexibility, and maintains accuracy across diverse physics simulations.

Contribution

The authors introduce a novel, homogeneous interface for multi-physics simulations that enables seamless, parallel, and error-resilient integration of diverse simulation modules.

Findings

Framework overhead is less than 1% of total runtime.

Simulations produce results consistent with traditional monolithic approaches.

The interface facilitates easy incorporation of multiple modules addressing the same physics.

Abstract

We introduce a general-purpose framework for interconnecting scientific simulation programs using a homogeneous, unified interface. Our framework is intrinsically parallel, and conveniently separates all component numerical modules in memory. This strict separation allows automatic unit conversion, distributed execution of modules on different cores within a cluster or grid, and orderly recovery from errors. The framework can be efficiently implemented and incurs an acceptable overhead. In practice, we measure the time spent in the framework to be less than 1% of the wall-clock time. Due to the unified structure of the interface, incorporating multiple modules addressing the same physics in different ways is relatively straightforward. Different modules may be advanced serially or in parallel. Despite initial concerns, we have encountered relatively few problems with this strict separation between modules, and the results of our simulations are consistent with earlier results using more traditional monolithic approaches. This framework provides a platform to combine existing simulation codes or develop new physical solver codes within a rich "ecosystem" of interchangeable modules.