CCP Turbulence
Simulating and understanding turbulent flows is one of the most challenging problems in science. The design of many engineering and industrial systems as well as the prediction of their impact on the environment greatly relies on the turbulent behaviour of fluid flows being properly quantified. Significant progress has been made recently using high performance computing (HPC), and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is now a critical complement to experiments and theories.
To support the activities of the UKTC and thanks to the support from EPSRC, the CCP Turbulence was created in 2019. The focus of the CCP Turbulence is to prepare the UKTC community to the exascale era.
With the many opportunities that exascale computing will bring to the turbulence community, there are abundant challenges. While the Navier-Stokes equations are a well-established and -accepted- mathematical model to describe the motions of a turbulent flow, their solutions can be extremely challenging to obtain, due to the chaotic and inherently multi-scale nature of turbulence. The smallest scales impact the largest scales, and small changes to boundary conditions, initial conditions, or mesh resolution, for example, can have a dramatic impact on the solution. The turbulent scales are typically separated by many orders of magnitude. As a result, simulations of turbulent flows can present a unique set of challenges such as the need for accurate turbulent models, global communications, an unfavourable computation to communication ratio and I/O (visualisations) bottlenecks.
The CCP Turbulence has been tackling these issues by gathering together computational fluid dynamicists, mathematicians, HPC centre managers, software development experts for the development of a software infrastructure dedicated to the study of turbulent flows.
Thanks to the CCP Turbulence, the capabilities of some of the UKTC flow solvers have been enhanced dramatically, opening up new research areas (within the UKTC's competence and also for users outside the consortium), with state-of-the-art simulations of complex turbulence problems that were until very recently beyond imagination.
The software developments within CCP Turbulence have enabled UK researchers to explore new physics and address fundamental questions regarding the physics and modeling of turbulent flows across various engineering, physiological, and geophysical applications.
This progress has also maximized the use of the Tier 1-3 UK infrastructure established in recent years. The CCP Turbulence is instrumental in maintaining the UKTC's global leadership in turbulence research and delivering internationally recognized scientific advancements on future generations of supercomputers.
Specifically, CCP Turbulence supports three flow solvers - OpenSBLI, Xcompact3d, and SENGA+ - which are open-source, well-established, and based on high-order finite-difference methods on structured meshes.
Additionally, the CCP Turbulence supports two libraries: OPS and 2DECOMP&FFT. OPS is an API with associated libraries and preprocessors that generate parallel executables on multiblock structured meshes. It has been instrumental in developing performance-portable, production-ready HPC applications for over a decade. 2DECOMP&FFT is a Fortran-based library using 2D domain decomposition for spatially implicit numerical algorithms on monoblock Cartesian meshes. It includes a highly scalable and efficient interface for performing Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs), relying on MPI but providing a user-friendly programming interface that abstracts communication details from application developers.
These flow solvers and libraries are widely used within the UKTC community and globally, benefiting a large number of scientists.
The software development and knowledge exchange activities in the CCP Turbulence are supported by CoSeC. The Computational Science Centre for Research Communities (CoSeC) enables and supports collaborative computational research communities that are funded across UKRI. It has a mission to deliver research software as an infrastructure in order to enable world-class UK Research and Innovation.
The CCP turbulence has secured funding and support from CoSeC until October 2026.
To support the activities of the UKTC and thanks to the support from EPSRC, the CCP Turbulence was created in 2019. The focus of the CCP Turbulence is to prepare the UKTC community to the exascale era.
With the many opportunities that exascale computing will bring to the turbulence community, there are abundant challenges. While the Navier-Stokes equations are a well-established and -accepted- mathematical model to describe the motions of a turbulent flow, their solutions can be extremely challenging to obtain, due to the chaotic and inherently multi-scale nature of turbulence. The smallest scales impact the largest scales, and small changes to boundary conditions, initial conditions, or mesh resolution, for example, can have a dramatic impact on the solution. The turbulent scales are typically separated by many orders of magnitude. As a result, simulations of turbulent flows can present a unique set of challenges such as the need for accurate turbulent models, global communications, an unfavourable computation to communication ratio and I/O (visualisations) bottlenecks.
The CCP Turbulence has been tackling these issues by gathering together computational fluid dynamicists, mathematicians, HPC centre managers, software development experts for the development of a software infrastructure dedicated to the study of turbulent flows.
Thanks to the CCP Turbulence, the capabilities of some of the UKTC flow solvers have been enhanced dramatically, opening up new research areas (within the UKTC's competence and also for users outside the consortium), with state-of-the-art simulations of complex turbulence problems that were until very recently beyond imagination.
The software developments within CCP Turbulence have enabled UK researchers to explore new physics and address fundamental questions regarding the physics and modeling of turbulent flows across various engineering, physiological, and geophysical applications.
This progress has also maximized the use of the Tier 1-3 UK infrastructure established in recent years. The CCP Turbulence is instrumental in maintaining the UKTC's global leadership in turbulence research and delivering internationally recognized scientific advancements on future generations of supercomputers.
Specifically, CCP Turbulence supports three flow solvers - OpenSBLI, Xcompact3d, and SENGA+ - which are open-source, well-established, and based on high-order finite-difference methods on structured meshes.
Additionally, the CCP Turbulence supports two libraries: OPS and 2DECOMP&FFT. OPS is an API with associated libraries and preprocessors that generate parallel executables on multiblock structured meshes. It has been instrumental in developing performance-portable, production-ready HPC applications for over a decade. 2DECOMP&FFT is a Fortran-based library using 2D domain decomposition for spatially implicit numerical algorithms on monoblock Cartesian meshes. It includes a highly scalable and efficient interface for performing Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs), relying on MPI but providing a user-friendly programming interface that abstracts communication details from application developers.
These flow solvers and libraries are widely used within the UKTC community and globally, benefiting a large number of scientists.
The software development and knowledge exchange activities in the CCP Turbulence are supported by CoSeC. The Computational Science Centre for Research Communities (CoSeC) enables and supports collaborative computational research communities that are funded across UKRI. It has a mission to deliver research software as an infrastructure in order to enable world-class UK Research and Innovation.
The CCP turbulence has secured funding and support from CoSeC until October 2026.
What are CCPs?
The Collaborative Computational Projects (CCPs) bring together leading UK expertise in key fields of computational research to tackle large-scale scientific software development, maintenance and distribution. Each project represents many years of intellectual and financial investment. The aim is to capitalise on this investment by encouraging widespread and long term use of the software, and by fostering new initiatives such as High End Computing consortia.
The CCPs enrich UK computational science and engineering research in various ways. They provide a software infrastructure on which important individual research projects can be built. They support both the R&D and exploitation phases of computational research projects. They ensure the development of software which makes optimum use of the whole range of hardware available to the scientific community, from the desktop to the most powerful national supercomputing facilities. The training activities of CCPs have been outstandingly successful, benefiting several hundred students and post-doctorates each year.
The main activities of the CCPs are to:
The collaborative approach makes the community almost uniquely able to adapt and respond to developments in computer science, information technology and hardware. One of the strengths of the scheme is that the focus of each CCP has evolved to maintain international scientific topicality and leadership within its community. The CCPs are increasingly represented in science and engineering as advances in computational techniques and hardware make it feasible to tackle problems of real practical significance.
CCPs have a high profile overseas. Many have links with European networks or programmes. The CCP Steering Panel includes international scientists. CCPs also provide opportunities for links with foreign institutions and scientists. CCPs maintain high visibility to industrial researchers by publicising their software, meetings, training and other activities, and by including industrial members on Working Groups and on the Steering Panel. The CCPs are funded competitively through regular Research Council grants. Since 1978, they have also benefited from support by staff at STFC’s Daresbury Laboratory and Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, funded via an agreement with the Research Councils. Such staff provide expert technical and administrative support, perform many of the functions outlined above, and are frequently involved in large-scale program development projects.
The Collaborative Computational Projects (CCPs) bring together leading UK expertise in key fields of computational research to tackle large-scale scientific software development, maintenance and distribution. Each project represents many years of intellectual and financial investment. The aim is to capitalise on this investment by encouraging widespread and long term use of the software, and by fostering new initiatives such as High End Computing consortia.
The CCPs enrich UK computational science and engineering research in various ways. They provide a software infrastructure on which important individual research projects can be built. They support both the R&D and exploitation phases of computational research projects. They ensure the development of software which makes optimum use of the whole range of hardware available to the scientific community, from the desktop to the most powerful national supercomputing facilities. The training activities of CCPs have been outstandingly successful, benefiting several hundred students and post-doctorates each year.
The main activities of the CCPs are to:
- Carry out flagship code development projects
- Maintain and distribute code libraries
The collaborative approach makes the community almost uniquely able to adapt and respond to developments in computer science, information technology and hardware. One of the strengths of the scheme is that the focus of each CCP has evolved to maintain international scientific topicality and leadership within its community. The CCPs are increasingly represented in science and engineering as advances in computational techniques and hardware make it feasible to tackle problems of real practical significance.
CCPs have a high profile overseas. Many have links with European networks or programmes. The CCP Steering Panel includes international scientists. CCPs also provide opportunities for links with foreign institutions and scientists. CCPs maintain high visibility to industrial researchers by publicising their software, meetings, training and other activities, and by including industrial members on Working Groups and on the Steering Panel. The CCPs are funded competitively through regular Research Council grants. Since 1978, they have also benefited from support by staff at STFC’s Daresbury Laboratory and Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, funded via an agreement with the Research Councils. Such staff provide expert technical and administrative support, perform many of the functions outlined above, and are frequently involved in large-scale program development projects.