Survey of Multiscale and Multiphysics Applications and Communities

TL;DR

This paper reviews multiscale and multiphysics applications, highlighting their growing popularity, diverse community approaches, and potential for enhanced collaboration through shared methods on common scales.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of multiscale applications, communities, and tools, emphasizing the need for cross-disciplinary sharing and collaboration.

Findings

Multiscale computing has become increasingly popular.

Different communities use diverse approaches to multiscale modeling.

Simulations at meters and hours are common across domains.

Abstract

Multiscale and multiphysics applications are now commonplace, and many researchers focus on combining existing models to construct combined multiscale models. Here we present a concise review of multiscale applications and their source communities. We investigate the prevalence of multiscale projects in the EU and the US, review a range of coupling toolkits they use to construct multiscale models and identify areas where collaboration between disciplines could be particularly beneficial. We conclude that multiscale computing has become increasingly popular in recent years, that different communities adopt very different approaches to constructing multiscale simulations, and that simulations on a length scale of a few metres and a time scale of a few hours can be found in many of the multiscale research domains. Communities may receive additional benefit from sharing methods that are geared towards these scales.