Faculty Interaction

Tom Downar

School of Nuclear Engineering
Co-director, Computing Research Institute
Director, Computational Science and Engineering program
Purdue University

Brief Project Description:
Numerical Nuclear Reactor

The Numerical Nuclear Reactor project is a collaboration between Purdue University, ANL (Argonne National laboratory) and KAERI (Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute). The nuclear engineering department at Purdue is involved in several research aspects of this project. One of this activity is to enhance the current capabilities of the application codes. This could involve performance optimization, parallel implementation and developing new parallel algorithms. The interaction has led to the development of a new ray tracing algorithm. The ray tracing algorithm is one of the main computational kernels of the DeCART (Deterministic Core Analysis based on Ray Tracing) application. The new ray tracing algorithm when implemented in the DeCART code will significantly enhance the capabilities of this application by providing enhanced parallelism and memory reduction. The figure below shows the axial view of the GE-12 main lattice fuel assembly showing how the lattice changes with height.

For this standard GE-12 problem the table below shows the memory requirements using the old and the new ray tracing approaches. The project is also involved in looking at performance and implementation issues with coupled calculations using Star-CD and DeCART.

References:

FINE GRAIN PARALLELIZATION OF MODULAR RAY TRACING IN 2D METHOD OF CHARACTERISTICS B. Kochunas, M. Sayeed, J. W. Thomas, T. J. Downar.

Paper formally accepted for presentation at the Joint International Topical Meeting on Mathematics & Computation and Supercomputing in Nuclear Applications (M&C + SNA 2007) Monterey, California, April 15-19, 2007.