Soleil-X : Turbulence, Particles, and Radiation in the Regent Programming Language

The Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program (PSAAP) II at Stanford University is developing an exascale-ready multi-physics solver to investigate particle-laden turbulent flows in a radiation environment for solar energy receiver applications. In order to simulate the proposed concentrated particle-based receiver design three distinct but coupled physical phenomena must be modeled: fluid flows, Lagrangian particle dynamics, and the transport of thermal radiation. Therefore, three different physics solvers (fluid, particles, and radiation) must run concurrently with significant cross-communication in an integrated multi-physics simulation. However, each solver uses substantially different algorithms and data access patterns. Coordinating the overall data communication, computational load balancing, and scaling these different physics solvers together on modern massively parallel, heterogeneous high performance computing systems presents several major challenges. We have adopted the Legion programming system, via the Regent programming language, and its task parallel programming model to address these challenges. Our multi-physics solver Soleil-X is written entirely in the high level Regent programming language and is one of the largest and most complex applications written in Regent to date. At this workshop we will give an overview of the software architecture of Soleil-X as well as discuss how our multi-physics solver was designed to use the task parallel programming model provided by Legion. We will also discuss the development experience, scaling, performance, portability, and multi-physics simulation results.