The High End Computing Consortium for Wave Structure Interaction (HEC-WSI) presents a series of talks demonstrating how ARCHER2 enables state-of-the-art research in wave–structure interaction.
Numerical Study on the Interaction of Breaking Waves and an Offshore Floating Wind Turbine under Realistic Sea States
Presenters: Lige Zhao (lige.zhao@plymouth.ac.uk)
Abstract: Wave breaking is one of the primary mechanisms of energy dissipation at the air–sea interface. The transient dynamics and strong instability of wave breaking introduce significant difficulties in both experimental and numerical modelling. In the COAST Laboratory at the University of Plymouth, a series of focused and irregular wave breaking experiments were conducted on a 1:69.29 scale WINDCRETE spar-type floating wind turbine model. These experiments highlighted the inherent instability of breaking events and the resulting transient pressure impacts on the spar structure. To further investigate the detailed hydrodynamic mechanisms of the impact process, the experiments were replicated numerically using OpenFOAM on ARCHER2. The high-resolution simulations enable detailed analysis of wave breaking dynamics, pressure distribution, and energy dissipation processes under realistic sea states.
Cross-platform GPU Implementation of OpenFOAM Using Only ISO C++ standard parallelism
Presenters: Jony Castagna (jony.castagna@stfc.ac.uk)
Abstract: In this work, we present our port of OpenFOAM to GPUs using the C++ standard parallel execution model (stdpar) introduced in ISO C++17. With a minimally intrusive strategy—primarily replacing serial loops with stdpar constructs—we offload the full computational workload of typical CFD simulations to multicore and manycore architectures. This approach is vendor agnostic, maintains a single unified codebase, and can be integrated easily into the main OpenFOAM release.
Numerical Simulation of a Floating Offshore Wind Turbine at Scale on ARCHER2 with OpenFOAM
Presenter: Tianyang Zhao (tianyang.zhao@eng.ox.ac.uk)
Abstract: This presentation introduces a wave–structure interaction (WSI) framework in OpenFOAM for simulating a slack-moored floating offshore wind turbine and shares practical experience of running it efficiently at scale on ARCHER2. The tutorial case represents the COAST Lab 1:70 physical model of the FOWT, including the platform–tower–nacelle rigid-body dynamics coupled with a mooring system using published mass properties, fairlead locations and mooring parameters. The geometry and coordinate systems are prepared so the body-fixed frame aligns with the global frame with the tower along the global Z axis, enabling clean interpretation of 6-DoF motions and loads. Additional libraries have been implemented and integrated into the OpenFOAM framework, providing the required coupling capability and ensuring the end-to-end simulation runs robustly in parallel. A representative run covers 115 s of simulated time and typically takes 43 hours on ARCHER2 using 512 CPU cores (4 × 128), producing 292 GB of data. The presentation highlights the end-to-end workflow (job setup, parallel strategy, and I/O/data management) and the key lessons learned for reliable, reproducible large-scale OpenFOAM FOWT simulations.
This online session is open to all. It will use the Blackboard Collaborate platform.