The purpose of the VECMA project is to enable a diverse set of multiscale, multiphysics applications -from fusion and advanced materials through climate and migration, to drug discovery and the sharp end of clinical decision making in personalized medicine — to run on current multi-petascale computers and emerging exascale environments with high fidelity such that their output is “actionable”. That is, the calculations and simulations are certifiable as validated (V), verified (V), and equipped with uncertainty quantification (UQ) by tight error bars such that they may be relied upon for making important decisions in all the domains of concern. The central deliverable is an open-source toolkit for multiscale VVUQ based on generic multiscale VV and UQ primitives, to be released in stages over the lifetime of this project, fully tested and evaluated in emerging exascale environments, actively promoted over the lifetime of this project, and made widely available in European HPC centers.
VECMA in a nutshell
Computer simulations are being used to predict the weather and climate change, model refugees, understand materials, develop nuclear fusion, and inform medical decisions. But if we are to use simulations in order to make predictions on the global climate emergency, guide aid to migrants fleeing combat, create new materials, help invent the first fusion reactor, and allow doctors to test medication on a virtual you (before the real you), then those simulations need to be reliable. In other words, they need to be validated, verified, and their uncertainty quantified so that they can feed into real-life applications and decisions. The VECMA project is developing software tools in order to validate, verify, and quantify the uncertainty on each of these simulation applications, and many besides.
The VECMA project is implemented by an international consortium consisting mainly of research and development units:
– University College London (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/)
– Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (https://www.ipp.mpg.de/en)
– Brunel University London (https://www.brunel.ac.uk/)
– Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (https://www.lrz.de/)
– Bull SAS (https://atos.net/en/)
– Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (https://www.cwi.nl/)
– CBK Sci Con Limited (SME) (https://www.cbkscicon.com/)
– University of Amsterdam (https://www.uva.nl/en)
– Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (https://www.psnc.pl)
