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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 145 records · Page 8

A new approach for modeling and analysis of molten salt reactors using SCALE

The Office of Fuel Cycle Technologies (FCT) of the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy is performing an evaluation and screening of potential fuel cycle options to provide information that can support future research and development decisions based on the more promising fuel cycle options. [1] A comprehensive set of fuel cycle options are put into evaluation groups based on physics and fuel cycle characteristics. Representative options for each group are then evaluated to provide the quantitative information needed to support the valuation of criteria and metrics used for the study. Included in this set of representative options are Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs), the analysis of which requires several capabilities that are not adequately supported by the current version of SCALE or other neutronics depletion software packages (e.g., continuous online feed and removal of materials). A new analysis approach was developed for MSR analysis using SCALE by taking user-specified MSR parameters and performing a series of SCALE/TRITON calculations to determine the resulting equilibrium operating conditions. This paper provides a detailed description of the new analysis approach, including the modeling equations and radiation transport models used. Results for an MSR fuel cycle option of interest are also provided to demonstrate the application to a relevant problem. The current implementation is through a utility code that uses the two-dimensional (2D) TRITON depletion sequence in SCALE 6.1 but could be readily adapted to three-dimensional (3D) TRITON depletion sequences or other versions of SCALE. (authors)

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

Intelligibility and Space-based Voice with Relaxed Delay Constraints

The inherent aspects and flaws surrounding space based communication is technically described and the math surrounding encoding and decoding LT Codes is examined. Utilizing LT codes as a means of reducing packet erasures due to corrupted packets on an RF link can result in higher voice quality. PESQ-MOS measure was used to analyze voice degradation over space links tested for LT codec size and number of 10ms per packet.Extensions utilizing LT codes to improve the packet erasure performance and combining the use of ASR could provide for a solid means of identifying the benefit in terms of intelligibility of voice communications in space-based networks

space communications↗

Simulation Utility Library for HPC codes

SimUtil contains various small utility functions used in multiple HPC simulation codes here at LLNL, such as: simulation parameter input parsing, parallel file-IO, memory allocation, unit parsing, and helper functions for using MPI.

Fattebert, Jean-Luc↗

Concatenated coding systems employing a unit-memory convolutional code and a byte-oriented decoding algorithm

Concatenated coding systems utilizing a convolutional code as the inner code and a Reed-Solomon code as the outer code are considered. In order to obtain very reliable communications over a very noisy channel with relatively small coding complexity, it is proposed to concatenate a byte oriented unit memory convolutional code with an RS outer code whose symbol size is one byte. It is further proposed to utilize a real time minimal byte error probability decoding algorithm, together with feedback from the outer decoder, in the decoder for the inner convolutional code. The performance of the proposed concatenated coding system is studied, and the improvement over conventional concatenated systems due to each additional feature is isolated.

Lee, L. N.↗

Concatenated coding systems employing a unit-memory convolutional code and a byte-oriented decoding algorithm

Concatenated coding systems utilizing a convolutional code as the inner code and a Reed-Solomon code as the outer code are considered. In order to obtain very reliable communications over a very noisy channel with relatively modest coding complexity, it is proposed to concatenate a byte-oriented unit-memory convolutional code with an RS outer code whose symbol size is one byte. It is further proposed to utilize a real-time minimal-byte-error probability decoding algorithm, together with feedback from the outer decoder, in the decoder for the inner convolutional code. The performance of the proposed concatenated coding system is studied, and the improvement over conventional concatenated systems due to each additional feature is isolated.

Lee, L.-N.↗

Modeling and simulation of oxygen transport in high burnup LWR fuel

We have developed a formulation for oxygen transport in uranium dioxide nuclear fuel that accounts for the effects of irradiation. The overall simulation combines the evolving isotopic composition, thermochemistry, and oxygen transport in irradiated fuel. The driving forces for oxygen transport are computed from local thermodynamic equilibrium calculations and account for the effects of temperature gradients and composition, including fission products. The proposed method provides a mechanism for including complex thermodynamic models of nuclear fuel in modeling of mass redistribution, and alleviates difficulties associated with the common thermodiffusion formulation. Here, the transport model has been implemented within the nuclear fuel performance code BISON utilizing the thermochemistry code Thermochimica, with burnup calculations provided by the ORIGEN isotopic transmutation code.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

Preliminary Verification and Validation of WEC-Sim, an Open-Source Wave Energy Converter Design Tool: Preprint

To promote and support the wave energy industry, a wave energy converter (WEC) design tool, WEC-Sim, is being developed by Sandia National Laboratories and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. In this paper, the WEC-Sim code is used to model a point absorber WEC designed by the U.S. Department of Energy's reference model project. Preliminary verification was performed by comparing results of the WEC-Sim simulation through a code-to-code comparison, utilizing the commercial codes ANSYS-AQWA, WaveDyn, and OrcaFlex. A preliminary validation of the code was also performed by comparing WEC-Sim simulation results to experimental wave tank tests.

16 TIDAL AND WAVE POWER↗

Surveying the LLNL WSC/CP DevOps Landscape - FY23 DevOps L2: Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) L2 Milestone 8542, "Spack Utilization in IC Code Projects”

This L2 milestone is a multifaceted review of DevOps practices across Weapon Simulation and Computing/Computational Physics (WSC/CP) Program, which includes Weapons, ICF, and Engineering simulation codes and supporting libraries. It complements the FY22 Spack/MARBL L2: Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) L2 Milestone 7904, “Workflow Portability Across Cloud Services”. The overall goal is to develop a path forward for improving DevOps practices in WSC/CP which will increase developer productivity, improve software quality, and speed up our ability to deliver capabilities to end users.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Edge ICRF simulations in 3D geometry: From MHD equilibrium to coupling determination

We present in this work a consistent numerical scheme that allows the computation of 3D magnetic fields a nd 3D density profiles and their usage in ion cyclotron range of frequencies (ICRF) coupling simulations. We first utilize the PARVMEC code to compute the 3D free-boundary plasma equilibrium in the ideal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) approximation. Since the PARVMEC solution is only defined within the last closed flux surface (LCFS), the magnetic field domain is extended to the scrape-off layer (SOL) via the BMW code, which computes a divergence-free magnetic field solution arising from the external conductors’ vacuum field a nd t he PARVMEC flux surface currents. This magnetic reconstruction is then used in the EMC3-EIRENE transport code in order to compute 3D density profiles. In the last step, the RAPLICASOL code is utilized to compute the ICRF antenna S-matrices resulting from the 3D density profiles. We exemplify this scheme for the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak. A new implementation of a curved model for the ASDEX Upgrade ICRF 2-strap antenna in RAPLICASOL allows simulations in realistic geometry, without any coordinate transformations.

Lopez, Graham↗

Optimization of Particle-in-Cell Codes on RISC Processors

General strategies are developed to optimize particle-cell-codes written in Fortran for RISC processors which are commonly used on massively parallel computers. These strategies include data reorganization to improve cache utilization and code reorganization to improve efficiency of arithmetic pipelines.

particle-cell-codes cache utilization code reorgan↗

Multi-node and Multi-core Performance Studies of a Monte Carlo code RMC

Over the past 15 years the architecture of high-performance computing systems has become increasingly heterogeneous with individual computing cores being subdivided into nodes and even auxiliary co-processing units such as graphics processing units or the Intel many integrated core co-processors. In fact, future computer platforms is moving toward a larger number of nodes and cores with lower memory available per node. Today, several production Monte Carlo codes use some types of hybrid parallelism strategy that makes use of shared-memory parallelism within a computing node and message-passing parallelism between nodes, which enables the codes to utilize available computing resources as much as possible, both among and within computing nodes on a cluster. The so-called hybrid parallelization is also possible with Reactor Monte Carlo Code RMC by activating both MPI and OpenMP parallel algorithms together. On HPC' which typically consists of several or several-ten thousand nodes equipping 16-32 computing intra-cores per node, simulation of RMC can be carried out in the hybrid parallelization with the MPI inter-node parallelization and the OpenMP intra-node parallelization. RMC has adopted a hybrid message-passing and shared-memory approach to parallelism, which enables the code to utilize available computing resources, both among and within computing nodes on a cluster. Shared-memory parallelism is especially valuable for large-model simulations because it enables multiple compute cores within a node to share common model information such as the geometry description, material, cross section and tally data, thus reducing the memory usage per processor. The calculation on the Tianhe-2 supercomputer took 6144 cores, resulting in a rate of 173,314,000 neutrons/minute for BEAVRS benchmark. While pin-wise full core H-M benchmark burnup calculations with millions of depletion regions was selected using MPI/OpenMP parallelism, the speed of 6,144 cores reach 1,843,200 burnable regions per minute. Keeping up with the continuing trend for increases in the number of computing resources within modern HPC systems is a significant challenge for teams that develop and maintain high-performance MC radiation transport solvers. order to address this challenge, RMC has adopted a hybrid message-passing and shared-memory approach to parallelism, which enables the code to utilize available computing resources, both among and within computing nodes on a cluster. Shared-memory parallelism is especially valuable for large-model simulations because it enables multiple compute cores within a node to share common model information such as the geometry description, material and composition definitions, and cross section data, thus reducing the memory usage per processor. The parallel performance has been studied by using two complex and representative benchmarks, H-M and BEAVRS benchmark. All simulations were run on Intel Xeon E5-2692 12 core, 2.2 GHz processors at MilkyWay-2 Super Computer with up to 12,288 available computing cores. While employing MPI parallelism, excellent parallel efficiency is achieved even above 12,000 processors and RMC reaches the parallel efficiency of 96% on 12,288 cores for the pin-by-pin computation of the BEAVRS benchmark. While BEAVRS criticality benchmark was selected using MPI/OpenMP parallelism, the speed of 6,144 cores reach 173,314,000 particles per minute. While pin-wise full core H-M benchmark burnup calculations with millions of depletion regions was selected using MPI/OpenMP parallelism, the speed of 6,144 cores reach 1,843,200 burnable regions per minute. Results from these studies demonstrate that RMC, using the hybrid parallel model described in this paper, is able to handle pin-wise full core burnup calculations with millions of depletion regions and scales well through thousands of processors. (authors)

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

New Methods of Uncertainty Quantification for Mixed Discrete-Continuous Variable Models

The scale and complexity of problems such as designing power grids or planning for climate change is growing rapidly, driving the development of complicated computer models. More complex models have longer run times and incorporate larger numbers of inputs, both continuous and discrete. For example, a detailed physics model may have continuous variables such as temperature, height or pressure along with discrete variables that indicate the choice of a material for a particular piece or the model to be used to calculate air flow. A power grid design model may have continuous variables such as generation capacity, power flow or demand along with discrete variables such as number of generators, number of transmission lines or binary variables to indicate whether or not a node is chosen for generation expansion. A growing awareness of uncertainty and the desire to make risk-informed decisions is causing uncertainty quantification (UQ) to be more routine and often required. UQ provides the underpinnings necessary to establish confidence in models and their use; therefore, much time and effort is being invested in creating efficient approaches for UQ. However, these efforts have been focused on models that take continuous variables as inputs. When discrete inputs are thrown into the mix, the basic approach is to repeat the UQ analysis for each combination of discrete inputs or some subset thereof; this rapidly becomes intractable. Because of the computational complexity inherent in mixed discrete-continuous models, researchers will focus on the uncertainty in their particular problem finding ways to take advantage of symmetries, simplifications or structures. For example, uncertainty propagation in certain dynamical systems can be efficiently carried out after various decomposition steps or uncertainty propagation in stochastic programming is confined to scenario generation. Unfortunately models are not always available for such machinations: models may be embedded in legacy codes, may utilize commercial off the shelf codes or may be created by stringing a series of codes together. It is also time consuming to start each problem from scratch; worse there may not be any simplifications or symmetries to take advantage of. For these situations a UQ method developed for any black box function is necessary. This report documents a new conceptual model for performing UQ for mixed discrete-continuous models which not only applies to any simulator function, but allows the use of the efficient UQ methods that have been developed for continuous inputs only. The conceptual model is presented and an estimation procedure is fleshed out for one class of problems. This is applied to variations of a mixed discrete-continuous optimization test problem. This procedure provides comparable results to a benchmark solution with fewer function evaluations.

Bauman, Lara E.↗

ANALYSIS OF COMMUNICATION PERFORMANCE DEGRADATION OF THE RADIATION TRANSPORT CODE PIDOTS ON HIGH-UTILIZATION, MULTI-USER HPC SYSTEMS

The PIDOTS radiation transport code implements a spatially decomposed Integral Transport Matrix Method (ITMM) solver, which is intended to fully utilize the capabilities of modern, massively parallel high-performance computing (HPC) systems. While the code shows promising results, there was also an unexpected loss of parallel efficiency on the test systems as the number of participating processors grew and the parallelization grain size got finer. We seek to identify and characterize the communication-latency based effects that contribute to this slowdown. Through the creation of a high-level, parameterized representation of the workload of the code, the communication methodology was identified as the likely reason. From there, low-level, InfiniBand communication performance data measured on the Falcon HPC at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) was used to produce a discrete-event model of the communication scheme. The data, as well as the model, show that infrequent, large spikes in send/receive latency drive an unexpectedly substantial increase in projected runtime of a code. Furthermore, these effects are more pronounced under the high-utilization, scattered-workload environment of Falcon. Based on results from the model, it can be shown that a high-communication volume, small message-size regime can easily lead to slowdowns of ~5-10x, when compared to ideal results, as the processor count increases.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Convolutional coding combined with continuous phase modulation

Background theory and specific coding designs for combined coding/modulation schemes utilizing convolutional codes and continuous-phase modulation (CPM) are presented. In this paper the case of r = 1/2 coding onto a 4-ary CPM is emphasized, with short-constraint length codes presented for continuous-phase FSK, double-raised-cosine, and triple-raised-cosine modulation. Coding buys several decibels of coding gain over the Gaussian channel, with an attendant increase of bandwidth. Performance comparisons in the power-bandwidth tradeoff with other approaches are made.

Pizzi, S. V.↗

Utilization of low-redundancy convolutional codes

This paper suggests guidelines for the utilization of low-redundancy convolutional codes with emphasis on providing a quick look capability (no decoding) and a moderate amount of coding gain. The performance and implementation complexity of threshold, Viterbi, and sequential decoding when used with low-redundancy, systematic, convolutional codes is discussed. An extensive list of optimum, short constraint length codes is found for use with Viterbi decoding, and several good, long constraint length codes are found for use with sequential decoding.

Cain, J. B.↗

VeraRun

VeraRun provides users a command-line utility that determines the sequence of VERA codes and utilities to be executed, calculates and determines PBS directives and job parameters, creates a job script, and submits the script on behalf of the user. While hiding all the details, the script allows the user to set PBS parameters explicitly. VeraRun is implemented as a Python package with host-specific configurations and job script templates. Host configurations are stored in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) files and specify machine characteristics (e.g., number of nodes, number of processors per node, memory available per node, location of VERA installations). Job templates are Bash scripts with parameters substituting for host-specific PBS directives and controls. These files are named by the hostname, thus making VeraRun extensible to other systems and environments. VeraRun reads the VERA input file to determine code and execution environment requirements, creating and optionally submitting a job script.

Lee, Ronaldw↗