's blog

The Gaia mission is an extraordinarily large project launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2013 to create the most precise 3D map of the Milky Way, describing the position, motion, and properties of nearly two billion objects. The Gaia Astrometric Verification Unit–Global Sphere Reconstruction (AVU–GSR) Parallel Solver derives the positions and proper motions of primary stars in the Milky Way observed with the Gaia satellite.

Understanding turbulent fluid flows lies at the heart of such versatile domains as climate, health, and energy. Modern methods used in flow simulations have yet to reach their efficiency limits in providing fast, high-resolution predictions. To answer outstanding questions about the nature of turbulence requires massive computing power and innovative  methods designed with computational efficiency at their core.

The field of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) struggles with challenges to resolve computational complexity and cost of the simulations. Executing the operations over large fine meshes at small timesteps requires the algorithms to be designed with parallel efficiency at their core. 

Climate scientists writing code have often been weary of multithreading, both on CPU and GPU, due to some aspect of non-reproducibility, across machines and implementations. However, the current state of the ICON model, with about 2 Million lines of code written since 2001, is living proof that porting legacy software to GPUs can be made possible with compiler directives.