Frontier and Summit simulations help optimize fusion reactor performance
San Diego – January 5, 2023 – Scientists at General Atomics (GA), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego (UC San Diego) work on two of California’s most powerful supercomputers, Given a certain computing time. It is of global reach as part of the Office of Science Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program of the Department of Energy (DOE).
Announced in November, the award will allow the team to run simulations to predict fusion plasma energy loss and optimize plasma performance in next-generation fusion energy reactors. GA Scientist Emily Belli will lead the project along with GA Director of Theory and Computational Sciences Jeff Candy and Scientist Gary Stabler. Igor Sfiligoi, a software developer at the University of California, San Diego. ORNL computational scientist he is Reuben Budiardja.
“Achieving practical and economical fusion energy requires a thorough understanding of how the burning plasma behaves during operation in a fusion reactor,” said Belli. “Since such simulations are very computationally intensive, this award is very important. The support from the DOE will help fill an important gap in fusion plasma theory.”
This year’s INCITE Awards are notable for including the first assignment to Frontier, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s (OLCF) flagship HPE Cray EX system. The system debuted in May as the world’s fastest supercomputer with a performance of 1.1 exaflops and a theoretical peak performance of 2. Exaflop. FLOPS (floating point operations per second) is a measure of computer processing speed, and an exascale facility like Frontier runs about 10 million times faster than a typical desktop computer.
About half of the team’s allotted computing time goes to Frontier, and the rest goes to OLCF’s Summit supercomputer, which is currently the third fastest system in the world.
A GA-led project will explore key concerns about fusion energy. In fusion reactors, effective and stable confinement of thermal energy within the plasma is required for ‘burning’ (ie, self-sustaining) fusion. However, plasma confinement is limited by particle and energy losses due to turbulence caused by instabilities that can limit performance. To design first-generation fusion power plants such as the GA fusion pilot plant, it is essential to understand the underlying mechanisms that drive turbulence in the burning plasma.
The team’s simulations use GA’s CGYRO code developed specifically for fusion simulations. The CGYRO algorithm is highly optimized for scalability on systems such as Frontier and Summit using state-of-the-art GPU-based architectures.
INCITE’s application process is open to researchers or research organizations worldwide with computationally intensive projects and is highly competitive. INCITE proposals are evaluated by a peer-reviewed panel of international experts, each representing a different scientific field. Proposals are also evaluated at a technical level by each computing facility for computational readiness and scalability of the project’s code and its algorithms.
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For more information, please contact:
Evan Cops
Strategic Communications Manager
858-455-3474
Evan.Polisar@ga.com
