The simulation focused on rocket exhaust, while the underlying method applies to a wide range of high-speed compressible flow problems.
Researchers in the United States have used an exascale supercomputer to perform the largest fluid dynamics simulation ever. It surpassed one quadrillion degrees of freedom in a single computational fluid dynamics problem.
The team used Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s exascale supercomputer El Capitan.The simulation focused on rocket exhaust while the underlying method also applies to a wide range of high-speed compressible flow problems — from aircraft noise prediction to biomedical fluid dynamics.The team focused on rocket–rocket plume interactions, simulating the turbulent exhaust flow from multiple rocket engines firing simultaneously.“From day one, we designed El Capitan to enable mission-scale simulations that were not previously feasible,” said Bronis R. de Supinski, chief technology officer for Livermore Computing. “We’re always interested in projects that help validate performance and scientific usability at scale. This demonstration provided insight into El Capitan’s behavior under real system stress. While we’re supporting multiple efforts internally — including our own Gordon Bell submission — this was a valuable opportunity to collaborate and learn from an external team with a proven code.”80-fold speedup over previous methodsThe research team also pointed out that they achieved an 80-fold speedup over previous methods, reduced the memory footprint by a factor of 25, and cut energy-to-solution by more than 5 times. By combining algorithmic efficiency with El Capitan’s chip design, they showed that simulations of this size can be completed in hours, not weeks.The research team is the finalist for the 2025 ACM Gordon Bell Prize, the highest honor in high-performance computing.To tackle the extreme challenge of simulating the turbulent exhaust flow generated by many rocket engines firing simultaneously, the team’s approach combined a newly proposed shock-regularization technique called Information Geometric Regularization , invented and implemented by professors Spencer Bryngelson of Georgia Tech, Florian Schäfer of NYU Courant and Ruijia Cao, who is now a Cornell Ph.D. student, according to a press release.“In my view, this is an intriguing and marked advance in the fluid dynamics field,” Bryngelson said. “The method is faster and simpler, uses less energy on El Capitan, and can simulate much larger problems than prior state-of-the-art — orders of magnitude larger.”500 quadrillion degrees of freedomThe team achieved better than 500 trillion grid points, or 500 quadrillion degrees of freedom, using all 11,136 nodes and more than 44,500 AMD Instinct MI300A Accelerated Processing Units on El Capitan. They further extended this to ORNL’s Frontier, surpassing one quadrillion degrees of freedom.The simulations were conducted with MFC, a permissively licensed open-source code maintained by Bryngelson’s group. These simulations represented the full exhaust dynamics of a complex configuration inspired by SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster, as per the release.Simulation sets a new benchmarkThe research team also highlighted that the simulation sets a new benchmark for exascale CFD performance and memory efficiency. It also paves the way for computation-driven rocket design, replacing costly and limited physical experiments with predictive modeling at unprecedented resolution.“In my view, this is an intriguing and marked advance in the fluid dynamics field,” said Georgia Tech’s Bryngelson, the project’s lead. “The method is faster and simpler, uses less energy on El Capitan, and can simulate much larger problems than prior state-of-the-art — orders of magnitude larger.”The team underlined that as private-sector spaceflight expands, launch vehicles increasingly rely on arrays of compact, high-thrust engines rather than a few massive boosters.This design provides manufacturing advantages, engine redundancy and easier transport, but also creates new challenges. When dozens of engines fire together, their plumes interact in complex ways that can drive searing hot gases back toward the vehicle’s base, threatening mission success.
Fluid Dynamics Simulation Rocket Exhaust Simulation
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