Search NASA⌕ Search

Engineering topics

Hamilton, Steven P

Publications and source records attributed to Hamilton, Steven P.

7 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

A Cast of Thousands: How the IDEAS Productivity Project Has Advanced Software Productivity and Sustainability

Computational and data-enabled science and engineering are revolutionizing advances throughout science and society, at all scales of computing. For example, teams in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project have been tackling new frontiers in modeling, simulation, and analysis by exploiting unprecedented exascale computing capabilities—building an advanced software ecosystem that supports next-generation applications and addresses disruptive changes in computer architectures. However, concerns are growing about the productivity of the developers of scientific software. Members of the Interoperable Design of Extreme-scale Application Software project serve as catalysts to address these challenges through fostering software communities, incubating and curating methodologies and resources, and disseminating knowledge to advance developer productivity and software sustainability. This article discusses how these synergistic activities are advancing scientific discovery—mitigating technical risks by building a firmer foundation for reproducible, sustainable science at all scales of computing, from laptops to clusters to exascale and beyond.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2015

Shift: A Massively Parallel Monte Carlo Radiation Transport Package

This paper discusses the massively-parallel Monte Carlo radiation transport package, Shift, developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It reviews the capabilities, implementation, and parallel performance of this code package. Scaling results demonstrate very good strong and weak scaling behavior of the implemented algorithms. Benchmark results from various reactor problems show that Shift results compare well to other contemporary Monte Carlo codes and experimental results.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2015

Three-dimensional discrete ordinates reactor assembly calculations on GPUs

In this paper we describe and demonstrate a discrete ordinates sweep algorithm on GPUs. This sweep algorithm is nested within a multilevel comunication-based decomposition based on energy. We demonstrated the effectiveness of this algorithm on detailed three-dimensional critical experiments and PWR lattice problems. For these problems we show improvement factors of 4 6 over conventional communication-based, CPU-only sweeps. These sweep kernel speedups resulted in a factor of 2 total time-to-solution improvement.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗
DOE OSTI2015

Analysis of Anderson Acceleration on a Simplified Neutronics/Thermal Hydraulics System

ABSTRACT A standard method for solving coupled multiphysics problems in light water reactors is Picard iteration, which sequentially alternates between solving single physics applications. This solution approach is appealing due to simplicity of implementation and the ability to leverage existing software packages to accurately solve single physics applications. However, there are several drawbacks in the convergence behavior of this method; namely slow convergence and the necessity of heuristically chosen damping factors to achieve convergence in many cases. Anderson acceleration is a method that has been seen to be more robust and fast converging than Picard iteration for many problems, without significantly higher cost per iteration or complexity of implementation, though its effectiveness in the context of multiphysics coupling is not well explored. In this work, we develop a one-dimensional model simulating the coupling between the neutron distribution and fuel and coolant properties in a single fuel pin. We show that this model generally captures the convergence issues noted in Picard iterations which couple high-fidelity physics codes. We then use this model to gauge potential improvements with regard to rate of convergence and robustness from utilizing Anderson acceleration as an alternative to Picard iteration.

Toth, Alex↗