Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

Research and training in Simulation Based Engineering Sciences (SBES) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) at Polytechnique Montral have a long history of close collaboration with key actors in the mechanical and aerospace industry. The applicants are recognized as world class experts with very strong publication records in CFD. Some of them have been pioneers of CFD development in Canada and today, they constitute one of the largest CFD group in Canada. In April 2016, the applicants were awarded an NSERC-CREATE grant to develop a training program in SBES to increase the number of MSc and PhD with a deep knowledge of computational engineering methods, techniques and practices in SBES. Success of such a program hinges on local access to mid-level computing platforms compatible with Computing Canada massively parallel distributed platforms. This is required for development, verification and validation of new simulation tools while simultaneously easing the tasks of input data preparation for large scale simulations. The applicants do research to analyze characterize and improve the performance of mechanical products and systems in the naval, offshore, aeronautical, mechanical, bio-medical, and hydro-electric sectors. These diverse systems have in common an acute need for accurate and reliable simulations of the flow behavior to support improvement of system performance. Collaboration with industrial partners along with transfer of know-how and technology ensure the relevance of the applicants research. The resulting industrial strength SBES environment will ensure long term support from our industrial partners. An intermediate computational platform is required to ensure their portability to CC computing environment. A local mid-server machine will serve for good practice parallelisation. This is required since these developments cannot be done on high-performance servers. Our choice is tailored to the strategic orientations chosen by Pr. Etienne, Pelletier, Garon and Batailly for their work on monolithic (fully-coupled) FE methods for complex flows and the design and optimization of non-smooth mechanical systems. Computers with a large amount of RAM and processors which runs the Linux operating system offer the best environment to continue developing, improving and promoting high order monolithic approaches.