OpenACC Blog

The OpenACC technical committee is proud to announce a new revision of the OpenACC specification! The first revision since November 2022, countless volunteer hours have gone into maintaining, interpreting, and evolving the OpenACC specification, and I’d like to thank everyone who has been involved. This specification revision has benefited from both longstanding members of the committee and the fresh eyes of new implementors asking questions.

In computational fluid dynamics, large-scale simulations of turbulence rely heavily on ‌a flow solver’s speed and adaptability, where functions such as inviscid flux and viscous flux can become bottlenecks to fast computations. Project RHEA, Reproducible Hybrid-architecture flow solver Engineered for Academia, is an open-source solution that enables groundbreaking engineering applications by successfully simulating turbulent flows with complex physics.

68% of the population is projected to live in urban areas by 2025 (Blocken, 2015). Simulating urban microclimates in real time, accounting for relationships between surface temperatures ‌and wind patterns, is crucial to smart city planning and urban mobility development. 

After a long “virtual” winter, the much-anticipated return of an in-person GTC in spring 2024 sparked a definite buzz in Silicon Valley and 2025 continued the momentum. 

Running from March 17 through March 21, 2025, NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) boasted over 1,000 talks and panels, 300 exhibitors, research posters, themed pavilions, demonstrations of NVIDIA technologies, hands-on training, and more! 
 

National Computational Infrastructure (NCI Australia) is a world-class supercomputer and data science hub. It supports high-performance computing (HPC) and AI applications, cloud computing, and data storage on a 100% green grid with over 8000 Australian and international users.

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.

The recent Open Accelerated Computing Summit (OAC Summit) brought together researchers and developers from around the world, sharing significant OpenACC updates and use cases and highlighting relevant modeling, simulation, and AI initiatives advanced by the Open Hackathons program.