An Essential Need for HPC in Nuclear Engineering Applications

By Meng-Jen (Vince) Wang, and Glenn E. Sjoden

Department of Civil and Environmental Enginnering, University of Utah

The University of Utah’s Nuclear Engineering Program (UNEP) has greatly benefitted from the tremendous resources afforded for research by the University of Utah’s Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC). The modern reality is that nuclear applications cannot be practically fielded without an extraordinary amount of modeling and simulation carried out prior to actual testing, evaluation, or new engineering endeavor. For this reason, we must maintain access to “premier” computing resources, such as those available via CHPC, simply because models that require detailed radiation transport simulations are computationally intense. Overall, radiation transport simulations consist of two main approaches: deterministic solvers that require solutions of many billions of simultaneous equations, or Monte Carlo based solvers that require billions of particle histories to simulate, in addition to proper pre-processing of nuclear data to enable complex system computations. UNEP maintains HPC parallel optimized codes that can utilize both deterministic and Monte Carlo solution approaches; in fact, most often, we must apply both approaches to validate our findings to ensure all nuances of profiling “where the radiation goes” is fully explored. This is where having the resources enabled by CHPC is essential; these HPC frameworks are comprehensively pressed to execute extremely accurate models, enabling us to achieve what others may not be able to, allowing us to proceed with novel research objectives with the knowledge that we can successfully achieve our end goals. 

For example, using both NOTCHPEAK and REDWOOD at CHPC, we have successfully executed simulations of highly accurate 3-D models of the University of Utah Training Reactor (UUTR), as shown in the above figure. Based on these results, we were able to complete the design of new neutron beam port and source configurations in our reactor, and complete a new beam stop and imaging chamber design.  In addition, the simulations  enabled us to design, optimize, and perform testing in our UUTR reactor to support a new methodology for Xe-135 gas standards for calibration studies used by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO).

For more information, see our Spring 2022 newsletter here.

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