Block-Structured Adaptive Mesh Refinement Co-Design Center
John Bell heads the center with support from Argonne National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The Co-Design Center is developing a new framework, AMReX, to support the development of block-structured AMR algorithms for solving systems of partial differential equations (PDE’s) with complex boundary conditions on exascale architectures. Block-structured AMR provides a natural framework in which to focus computing power on the most critical parts of the problem in the most computationally efficient way possible.
Block-structured AMR is already widely used to solve many problems relevant to DOE. Berkeley Lab’s Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering, which Bell previously led, and the lab’s Applied Numerical Algorithms Group have respectively developed BoxLib and Chombo, two of the leading AMR frameworks used by the U.S. research community. Codes in six of the 22 exascale application projects (in the areas of accelerators, additive manufacturing, astrophysics, combustion, cosmology, and multiphase flow) rely on the AMReX software framework.