Collaboration fuses codes for efficient simulation
Posted June 4, 2007
Ravi Samtaney knew computer resources beyond anything practically available would be required to run codes he designed to simulate a reactor the size of ITER, the international experiment to develop commercially feasible fusion energy.
So Samtaney, a research physicist at the Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, joined a bicoastal collaboration with the Advanced Numerical Algorithms Group at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) near San Francisco.
The group specializes in algorithms – mathematical recipes – and software designed to efficiently simulate huge scales of time and space.
Fusion reactors seek to harness the process that powers the sun to bring clean, plentiful energy to Earth. Read the feature story.
In the refueling scheme Samtaney modeled, pellets of frozen hydrogen isotopes smaller than a pencil eraser are shot into plasma more than six times hotter than the sun’s core. A donut-shaped chamber holds the superheated plasma with powerful magnetic fields.
The usual way to simulate such a process is to use data grids or meshes, which distribute discrete data points through the domain being modeled. By calculating what’s happening at each point, the computer paints a picture of the entire process.
But distributing points evenly through a space as large as ITER creates a huge computational problem.
