ACIC

Tools & Infrastructure

ACIC develops and operates its own simulation software and high-performance computing infrastructure. The tools described here are used in — and in some cases were created for — our DRDC research program.

EXN/Aero

EXN/Aero is a general-purpose computational fluid dynamics solver developed in-house at ACIC, built from the ground up for manycore CPU and GPU architectures. It is implemented using CUDA, OpenMP, and MPI, enabling it to run efficiently on a range of hardware from single workstations to multi-GPU HPC clusters.

EXN/Aero was co-developed with DRDC and Envenio and has been the primary CFD tool for ACIC's Victoria Class submarine research since the mid-2010s. Applications include detached eddy simulation (DES) at 100 million cell resolution, wall-modelled large eddy simulation (WMLES), 6-DOF maneuvering studies, and hydroacoustic analysis. The solver runs on ACIC's in-house Mach series supercomputers and scales to national and cloud HPC resources.

Stage²

Stage² is ACIC's workflow orchestration platform for scientific computing. It manages the movement of data and computation across edge devices, local HPC clusters, and cloud infrastructure — making it possible to run complex, multi-stage simulation pipelines without manually managing the transitions between computing environments.

Stage² is the foundation of the SpatialOne platform and is actively used in ACIC research and industry projects. It supports integration with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as national HPC resources through Compute Canada and ACENET.

HPC Infrastructure

ACIC operates its own in-house high-performance computing infrastructure, providing dedicated GPU compute capacity for research that requires long-running, large-scale simulations.

System	Hardware	Active Period
Mach1	NVIDIA K80 GPU cluster	2012–2018
Mach2	NVIDIA V100 GPU cluster	2019–2025
Mach3	NVIDIA GB-series cluster	2025– (in development)

In addition to in-house resources, ACIC has access to national compute allocation through NDRIO/NOIRN and Compute Canada, and uses cloud infrastructure through AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud for appropriate workloads.