General Atomics Scientists Use Cray X1E Supercomputer at ORNL to Make Important Advance in Fusion Research

General Atomics Scientists Use Cray X1E Supercomputer at ORNL to Make Important Advance in Fusion Research

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced that General Atomics researchers using a Cray X1E(TM) supercomputer have made a significant breakthrough in their ability to predict what happens inside an experimental fusion reactor, a milestone on the way to developing a stable and efficient new power source. Fusion is the nuclear reaction that fuels stars like the sun and has the potential to produce clean, almost limitless power here on Earth.

The General Atomics scientists are employing a computer code they wrote called GYRO, scaled to the massive compute capabilities of a Cray X1E system located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), to simulate the complex behavior of the super-heated gaseous fuel called plasma as it roils within a reactor. Working under a grant of computer time from the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, the researchers have for the first time been able to simulate both electron and ion plasma turbulence, a crucial step for eventually designing and building a full-scale, energy-producing fusion reactor.

“Approximation is the name of the game in physics,” said Jeff Candy, principal scientist in the Energy Group at General Atomics. “GYRO performs a faithful gyrokinetic approximation of the fundamental physics that occurs when the nuclei of deuterium and tritium atoms fuse within a reactor’s magnetic containment field. Normally researchers do smaller electron-scale simulations of the plasma. But the Cray X1E supercomputer at ORNL has allowed us to combine electron-scale and ion-scale simulations to produce a much closer approximation of turbulence fluxes for various temperatures and densities. Modeling these instabilities on the actual reactor would be very time-consuming and expensive.”

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