World’s fastest supercomputer runs record-breaking fluid simulation for rocket testing

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have leveraged the exascale supercomputer El Capitan to perform the largest-ever fluid dynamics simulation, surpassing one quadrillion degrees of freedom in a single computational fluid dynamics (CFD) problem. The simulation modeled turbulent rocket exhaust flows from multiple engines firing simultaneously, a scenario relevant to modern rocket designs like SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster. Using a novel shock-regularization technique called Information Geometric Regularization (IGR), developed by a team including professors from Georgia Tech and NYU, the researchers achieved an 80-fold speedup over previous methods, reduced memory usage by 25 times, and cut energy consumption by more than five times. The simulation utilized all 11,136 nodes and over 44,500 AMD Instinct MI300A Accelerated Processing Units on El Capitan, and was extended on Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Frontier supercomputer. This breakthrough sets a new benchmark for exascale CFD performance and memory efficiency