On-the-fly postprocessing and feature extraction of flame and flow properties obtained by Direct Numerical Simulations

• Applicants: Professor Dr.-Ing. Holger Theisel; Professor Dr. Dominique Thévenin
• Subject Area: Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing ; Software Engineering and Programming Languages ; Fluid Mechanics
• Term: from 2014 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 250921653

Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) are presently recognized as the best possible solution to investigate numerically turbulent flows. However, DNS at high Reynolds numbers require billions of grid points and are pursued during thousands of time iterations. When considering even more complex flows involving chemical reactions, many variables have to be analyzed and correlated in space and time in order to test and develop reduced models. This leads to Terabytes or even Petabytes of raw data, which cannot be stored any more on existing disk space, nor transferred within an acceptable time using any existing computer network. It is therefore necessary to develop new approaches. A simultaneous analysis and postprocessing of the generated flow data during the corresponding DNS simulations (on-the-fly analysis) appears to be particularly promising in this regard, since significantly less data has to be stored and handled this way. This analysis is realized by on-the-fly feature extraction: features of the flow and scalar fields are extracted in parallel to data generation by DNS, such that the data files do not need to be stored any more. However, this is associated with considerable chal-lenges concerning data analysis, feature extraction, parallelization and relevant numerical techniques.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants