TOPS: the
SciDAC Terascale Optimal (Complexity) PDE Simulations
Enabling Technology Center
The TOPS ETC focuses on developing, implementing,
and supporting optimal or near optimal schemes for PDE simulations, including optimization of PDE-constrained systems, eigenanalysis of PDE systems, and adaptive time integration of PDE systems. The Terascale Optimal PDE Simulations (TOPS) Center will research, develop, and deploy an integrated toolkit of open source, (nearly) optimal complexity solvers for the nonlinear partial differential equations that arise in many Office of Science application areas, including fusion, accelerator design, global climate change, and reactive chemistry. These algorithms —primarily multilevel methods — aim to reduce computational bottlenecks by one to three orders of magnitude on terascale computers, enabling scientific simulation on a scale heretofore impossible. Along with usability, robustness, and algorithmic efficiency, an important goal of this ETC will be to attain the highest possible computational performance in its implementations by accommodating to the memory bandwidth limitations of hierarchical memory architectures.