FDBB: Fluid Dynamics Building Blocks

Abstract: High-performance computing platforms are becoming more and more heterogeneous, which makes it very difficult for researchers and scientific software developers to keep up with the rapid changes on the hardware market. In this paper, the open-source project FDBB (Fluid Dynamics Building Blocks) is presented, which eases the development of fluid dynamics applications for heterogeneous systems. It consists of a low-level API that provides a unified interface to many different linear algebra back-ends and a lightweight and extendible high-level expression template library, which provides largely customizable fluid dynamics building blocks, like transformations between primary and secondary variables as well as expressions for Riemann invariants, equations of state, inviscid fluxes and their flux-Jacobians. The performance of the developed approach is assessed both for synthetic micro-benchmarks and within mini-applications.