Fluid dynamics is a broad field spanning a large number of science and engineering problem domains that are critical to a wide variety of important applications including manufacturing, climate analysis, environment, health, transportation, propulsion, and power generation. To support the fluid dynamics research and applications community, this project seeks to engage the community in order to conceptualize a future institute, the Computational Fluid Dynamics Software Infrastructure (CFDSI), that will broadly develop, share, and apply computational tools for the generation and analysis of fluid dynamics data from both experimental and computational sources. After its conceptualization, CFDSI will create and extend tools for problem definition, solution, and analysis of both computational and experimental investigations. The primary objective is to facilitate the sharing of computational tools and data resources through a rich and extensible set of software components that can be integrated into a wide range of existing fluid dynamics analysis tools. By improving the efficiency of tools and their ease of use, the ability for scientists and engineers to accurately predict and understand how complex fluid flows behave will be enhanced, having a significant impact on design, innovation, and discovery across the vast range of applications where fluid dynamics plays a role. CFDSI even has the potential to impact on K-12, undergraduate and graduate education by making a wide variety of resources available to students for fluid dynamics investigations.
The conceptualized institute will make a wide variety of powerful simulation, data, and analysis resources available to the fluid dynamics research community by lowering or eliminating barriers associated with the adoption and use of these resources. The software infrastructure will have a number of positive impacts on the fluid dynamics research community. To do so, CFDSI will connect the best research in fluid dynamics to the best research in data science/analytics within a highly sustainable software development environment. Specifically, CFDSI will: 1) enhance the dissemination of fluid dynamics data resources and advances in CFD modeling, 2) facilitate collaboration in fluid dynamics research, especially between computational and experimental researchers, 3) enable detailed comparisons between different data sources and detailed validation of computational models, 4) ease the use of advanced CFD models, methods, and codes in new and complex applications, 5) facilitate advanced analytics, such as uncertainty quantification, data compression, and optimization, 6) provide students access to advanced CFD methods and data resources, both computational and experimental, to enhance both graduate and undergraduate education in fluid dynamics, 7) improve the sustainability of current and future CFD software, and 8) facilitate the management of the growing body of fluid dynamics data sets. These outcomes will greatly enhance the effectiveness and productivity of research in fluid dynamics. In particular, they will transform the conduct of fluid dynamics research by: 1) making it more collaborative, 2) enhancing the credibility of research results, 3) enabling discovery, 4) reducing the cost of pursuing new research questions, and 5) diversifying and widening the fluid dynamics community through lowering the barriers associated with accessing and adopting CFD codes and large data sets. Software components will be designed for both analysis of experimental and computational databases as well as direct integration into CFD codes. The latter will enable in situ data analytics to address the growing chasm between data creation rate (solver performance) and data storage rate/volume (I/O resources). After conceptualization and implementation, CFDSI will enable more effective fluid dynamics research and thus impact the wide variety of application domains in which fluid dynamics is critical including manufacturing climate, environment, health, transportation, propulsion, and power generation (including conventional, alternative, and nuclear sources) which will, in turn, strongly impact our economy. Additionally, CFDSI will provide the capability for immersive simulations and experiments that will close the loop on idea, insight, discovery, and design through establishing links to in situ data analytics and problem redefinition during ongoing simulations or experiments. Finally, CFDSI will impact other problem domains governed by partial differential equations (e.g. solid mechanics) by serving as a model and starting point for similar domain-specific software infrastructures.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
