Sensitivity of computational fluid dynamics simulations against soft errors

Abstract

Computational capabilities of the largest high performance computing systems have increased by more than 100 folds in the last 10 years and keep increasing substantially every year. This increase is made possible mostly by multi-core technology besides the increase in clock speed of CPUs. Nowadays, there are systems with more than 100 thousand cores installed and available for processing simultaneously. Computational simulation tools are always in need of more than available computational sources. This is the case for especially complex, large scale flow problems. For these large scale problems, the soft error tolerance of the simulation codes should also be encountered where it is not an issue in relatively small scale problems due to the low occurrence probabilities. In this study, we analyzed the reaction of an incompressible flow solver to randomly generated soft errors at several levels of computation. Soft errors are induced into the final global assembly matrix of the solver by manipulating predetermined bit-flip operations. Behaviour of the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver is observed after iterative matrix solver, flow convergence and CFD iterations. Results show that the iterative solvers of CFD matrices are highly sensitive to customized soft errors while the final solutions seem more intact to bit-flip operations. But, the solutions might still differ from the real physical results depending on the bit-flip location and iteration number. So, the next generation computing platforms and codes should be designed to be able to detect bit-flip operations and be designed bit-flip resistant.