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First Exascale Flow Simulations of Fission and Fusion Energy Systems

Published: 02 July 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Advanced fission and fusion energy hold promise as a reliable, carbon-free energy source capable of meeting the United States' commitments to addressing climate change. A wave of investment in fission and fusion power within the United States and worldwide indicates an important maturation of academic research projects into the commercial space. Nonetheless, the design, certification, and licensing of novel reactor concepts pose formidable hurdles to successfully deploying new technologies. Because of the high cost of integral-effect nuclear experiments, high-fidelity numerical simulation is poised to play a crucial role in these efforts. This talk explores recent pioneering large-scale fluid flow high-fidelity simulation of fusion energy systems. First-of-a-kind, full-core simulations of fission reactors have been conducted on Frontier. Simulations of unprecedented scale have also been conducted for fusion energy systems. In particular, we model high Reynolds number flow with heat transfer in the CHIMERA facility designed to study fusion breeding blankets. Simulations have been performed on Frontier, the world's fastest supercomputer, with up to 9000 nodes. The simulations performed are significantly larger than prior work in our field. We emphasize that only exascale resources make these simulations possible. We employ NekRS, a GPU-oriented version of the Nek5000 code, which is a highly scalable open-source spectral element code for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation. Far from being a purely academic pursuit, the capabilities provided by NekRS enable scientific discovery for a range of applications crucial to fission and fusion energy deployment. We spend the latter part of the talk on this aspect, emphasizing the importance of bridging the gap between supercomputing and scientific and engineering practice.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CF '24: Proceedings of the 21st ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers
May 2024
345 pages
ISBN:9798400705977
DOI:10.1145/3649153
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 02 July 2024

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  • Invited-talk
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  • Refereed limited

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CF '24
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CF '24 Paper Acceptance Rate 33 of 105 submissions, 31%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 273 of 785 submissions, 35%

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CF '25

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