News & Announcements

April 26, 2013

"Special Journal Issue Highlights Multiphysics Research"

The rapidly increasing power of supercomputers offers the promise of breakthrough science through advanced simulations. Many of these simulations involve complex interactions – for example, between chemical reactions and transport in combustion or subsurface flows. Without new algorithms and software, however, such “multiphysics simulations,” as they are termed, may not be possible in extreme-scale computational environments.

David Keyes, Lois Curfman McInnes, Carol Woodward, and more than 40 of their colleagues address this situation in an article titled “Multiphysics simulations: Challenges and opportunities,” which appeared recently in a special issue of the International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications (IJHPCA).  As of April 2013, the document leads the list of most downloaded IJHPCA articles for the previous month.

The article begins with a discussion of similarities among multiphysics problems and those that are multimodel, multiscale, multirate, and multilevel.  Multiphysics applications are examined from both algorithmic and architectural perspectives, with discussion of issues in spatial and temporal coupling as well as consideration of software and hardware challenges.

Another strength of the article is the discussion of both the strong points and weaknesses of current and proposed approaches. For example, while sharing methods and codes among application fields seems desirable, collaborative multiphysics software development raises issues about licensing and maintaining a stable development environment.