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Ljubljana Supercomputing Center - LSC ADRIA |
With almost 60 years of experience in research and development of Turbo machinery and with more than twenty years experience in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), and as one of only two independent laboratories in the world capable and equipped to perform model acceptance tests according to IEC 60193 Turboinštitut is one of the well recognized developer of turbomachinery technology.
Supercomputing centre called Ljubljana Supercomputer Center – ADRIA will be located in the new building, inaugurated in April 2008 and equipped with the most powerful supercomputer in this part of Europe. The mission of such supercomputing centre is to investigate, develop and manage information technology in order to facilitate scientific progress.
The computational power of LSC Adria will be quite large. The parallel computer cluster will have 2048 processors, 4096 GB RAM and 10 TB disk storage. The foreseen computer cluster enables to make more than 10000 complicated CFD analyses per year. Cluster building blocks are IBM's H series Blades. For the computational node interconnect, we have implemented Infiniband low latency interconnect. Software for cluster support as well as the operating system is open source based.
 The LSC will be used for fluid flow simulation as daily tool for development of new and analyses of old turbines and pumps. Power of new LSC will allow nonstationary calculations of the flow using millions of elements which will significantly improve realiability of fluid flow simulation in hydraulic machies. Additional users of the computing centre will be the Universities from the above mentioned region and industry with the need of computation-intensive methods. One of the wide spread application area is CFD. Related industries which are the possible users of CFD are: Aerospace, Automotive, Chemical Processing, Civil Engineering, Electronics, Environmental, Defense, HVAC/Refrigeration, Marine/Offshore, Medical, Power Generation, Semiconductor and Turbo machinery. Historically, the ratio of CFD users to the overall engineering community was small. So, one of the challenges of the supercomputing center is to enable the use of CFD to a much broader audience. In the past the problem of using CFD has been in the lack of powerful computers and educated engineers. The new center will enable to educate on postgraduate level and also give opportunity to the industry to start using CFD in the development process. The combination of powerful computers with more sophisticated simulation tools can solve problems that could not have been considered just a decade ago.
In last ten years the number of industrial users of CFD in Western Europe is growing fast. In the middle and south-east Europe the situation is entirely different. In the south-east Europe the usage of CFD in industry is still very modest, so in the near future can be expected that the number of CFD users will grow faster.
Many applications are directly or indirectly connected to renewable energy technologies which are very important to stop the climate changes. All processes in the nature are unsteady and also numerical analyses of such processes have to be done using unsteady methods. Powerful computer clusters enable to perform the millions of calculations required to simulate the numerical prediction of unsteady processes.
Collaborating institutions in research activities in LSC Adria in Turboinštitut are Universities in Ljubljana and Maribor and software company NUMECA International from Belgium.
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