We present a novel, highly scalable and optimized solver for turbulent flows based on high-order discontinuous Galerkin discretizations of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations aimed to minimize time-to-solution. The solver uses explicit-implicit time integration with variable step size. The central algorithmic component is the matrix-free evaluation of discretized finite element operators. The node-level performance is optimized by sum-factorization kernels for tensor-product elements with unique algorithmic choices that reduce the number of arithmetic operations, improve cache usage, and vectorize the arithmetic work across elements and faces. These ingredients are integrated into a framework scalable to the massive parallelism of supercomputers by the use of optimal-complexity linear solvers, such as mixed-precision, hybrid geometric-polynomial-algebraic multigrid solvers for the pressure Poisson problem. The application problem under consideration are fluid dynamical simulations of the human respiratory system under mechanical ventilation conditions, using unstructured/structured adaptively refined meshes for geometrically complex domains typical of biomedical engineering.

High-performance computing (HPC) is recognized as one of the pillars for further progress in science, industry, medicine, and education. Current HPC systems are being developed to overcome emerging architectural challenges in order to reach Exascale level of performance, projected for the year 2020. The much larger embedded and mobile market allows for rapid development of intellectual property (IP) blocks and provides more flexibility in designing an application-specific system-on-chip (SoC), in turn providing the possibility in balancing performance, energy-efficiency, and cost. In the Mont-Blanc project, we advocate for HPC systems being built from such commodity IP blocks, currently used in embedded and mobile SoCs. As a first demonstrator of such an approach, we present the Mont-Blanc prototype; the first HPC system built with commodity SoCs, memories, and network interface cards (NICs) from the embedded and mobile domain, and off-the-shelf HPC networking, storage, cooling, and integration solutions. We present the system's architecture and evaluate both performance and energy efficiency. Further, we compare the system's abilities against a production level supercomputer. At the end, we discuss parallel scalability and estimate the maximum scalability point of this approach across a set of applications.