ASTE: An artificial solver testing environment for partitioned coupling with preCICE
David Schneider, Muhammed Kürşat Yurt, Frédéric Simonis, Benjamin Uekérmann · The Journal of Open Source Software · 2024
Simulating multi-physics phenomena for real-world applications states various challenges in scientific computing.Each individual physical domain has behavior that is often described through a distinct set of partial-differential equations that needs to be solved in that domain.Their interaction is then achieved through bidirectional exchange of suitable coupling data between all involved domains.Partitioned coupling tackles multi-physics simulations by glueing together separate models, typically implemented in separate software environments.To facilitate such partitioned multi-physics simulations effectively, so-called coupling libraries offer commonly required functionality.We focus in particular on coupling through the open-source library preCICE (Chourdakis et al., 2022), which offers functionality for data communication, data mapping, coupling schemes, and more.In the most basic setup, at least two executables call preCICE to perform a coupled simulation.As additional software components, so-called adapters bridge the gap between the preCICE API and the software environments used by the coupled models.Creating and using this overall setup for early development purposes is not only cumbersome, but also very inefficient.The artificial solver testing environment (ASTE) allows for replacing models coupled via preCICE with artificial ones, potentially in parallel distributed across multiple ranks on distributed memory.This helps in the development of preCICE, adapters, or simulation setups by reducing the necessary software components, simplifying execution workflows, and reducing runtime of the case.In addition, ASTE provides performance and accuracy metrics of the configured simulation setup.