Micheal Smith | Emory University (original) (raw)

Micheal Smith

Address: Atlanta, United States

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Papers by Micheal Smith

Research paper thumbnail of Enabling high-fidelity neutron transport simulations on petascale architectures

The UNIC code is being developed as part of the DOE's Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simula... more The UNIC code is being developed as part of the DOE's Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) program. UNIC is an unstructured, deterministic neutron transport code that allows a highly detailed description of a nuclear reactor core in our numerical simulations. The goal of our simulation efforts is to reduce the uncertainties and biases in reactor design calculations by progressively replacing existing multi-level averaging (homogenization) techniques with more direct solution methods based on first principles. Since the neutron transport equation is seven dimensional (three in space, two in angle, one in energy, and one in time), these simulations are among the most memory and computationally intensive in all of computational science. To model the complex geometry of a reactor core, billions of spatial elements, hundreds of angles, and thousands of energy groups are necessary, which leads to problem sizes with petascale degrees of freedom. Therefore, these calculations exhaust memory resources on current and even next-generation architectures. In this paper, we present UNIC simulation results for two important representative problems in reactor design/analysis -PHENIX and ZPR. In each case, UNIC shows excellent weak scalability on up to 163,840 cores of BlueGene/P (Argonne) and 131,072 cores of XT5 (ORNL).

Research paper thumbnail of Enabling high-fidelity neutron transport simulations on petascale architectures

The UNIC code is being developed as part of the DOE's Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simula... more The UNIC code is being developed as part of the DOE's Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) program. UNIC is an unstructured, deterministic neutron transport code that allows a highly detailed description of a nuclear reactor core in our numerical simulations. The goal of our simulation efforts is to reduce the uncertainties and biases in reactor design calculations by progressively replacing existing multi-level averaging (homogenization) techniques with more direct solution methods based on first principles. Since the neutron transport equation is seven dimensional (three in space, two in angle, one in energy, and one in time), these simulations are among the most memory and computationally intensive in all of computational science. To model the complex geometry of a reactor core, billions of spatial elements, hundreds of angles, and thousands of energy groups are necessary, which leads to problem sizes with petascale degrees of freedom. Therefore, these calculations exhaust memory resources on current and even next-generation architectures. In this paper, we present UNIC simulation results for two important representative problems in reactor design/analysis -PHENIX and ZPR. In each case, UNIC shows excellent weak scalability on up to 163,840 cores of BlueGene/P (Argonne) and 131,072 cores of XT5 (ORNL).

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