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CESAR

From Modelado Foundation

Revision as of 22:06, February 12, 2013 by imported>Cdenny
CESAR
Location to an image/logo (if any)
Image Caption
Developer(s) Center for Exascale Simulation of Advanced Reactors, ANL
Stable Release x.y.z/Latest Release Date here
Operating Systems Linux, Unix, etc.
Type Computational Chemistry?
License Open Source or else?
Website https://cesar.mcs.anl.gov/

CESAR (Center for Exascale Simulation of Advanced Reactors)


Goals

  • Developing algorithms to enable efficient reactor physics calculations on exascale computing platforms
  • Influencing exascale hardware/x-stack priorities, innovation based on “needs” key algorithms


Challenge

CESAR Challenge: Predict Pellet-by-Pellet Power Densities and Nuclide Inventories for the Full Life of Reactor Fuel (~5 years)

CESAR-Challenge.png

Applications

CESAR-Applications.png


Proxy Apps

  • Mini-apps: reduced versions of applications intended to …
    • Enable communication of application characteristics to non-experts
    • Simplify deployment of applications on range of computing systems
    • Facilitate testing with new programming models, hardware, etc.
    • Serve as a basis for performance model, profiling
  • Must distinguish between code and application of code
    • One key for mini-app is to appropriately constrain problem, input etc.
    • We all worry about abstracting away important features
  • For CESAR the three key mini-apps are
    • Nek-bone: spectral element poisson equation on a square
    • MOC-FE: 3d ray tracing (method of characteristics) on a cube
    • mini-OpenMC: Monte Carlo transport on a pre-built simplified lattice
    • TRIDENT: transport/cfd coupling, still under development
  • Algorithmic innovations for exascale embedded in kernel apps:
    • MCCK, EBMS, TRSM, etc.


Monte Carlo LWR

  • What is the scale of Monte Carlo LWR Problem?

CESAR-MonteCarlo-LWR.png

  • State of the art MC codes can perform single-step depletion with 1% statistical accuracy for 7,000,000 pin power zones in ~100,000 core-hours
  • What is needed for Exascale Application of Monte Carlo LWR Analysis?
    • Efficient on-node parallelism for particle tracking (70% scalability on up to 48 cores per node but wide variation and possible limitations)
    • The ability to execute efficiently with non-local 1 T-byte data tallies
    • The ability to access very large x-section lookup tables efficiently during tracking
    • The ability to treat temperature-dependent cross sections data in each zone
    • The ability to couple to detailed fuels/fluids computational modeling fields
    • The ability to efficiently converge neutronics in non-linear coupled fields
    • Capability of bit-wise reproducibility for licensing: data resiliency model key


Co-design Opportunities

Co-design opportunities for Temperature-Dependent Cross Sections

  • Cross section data size:
    • ~2 G-byte for 300 isotopes at one temperature
    • ~200 G-byte for tabulation over 300K-2500K in 25K intervals
      • Data is static during all calculations
      • Exceeds node memory of anticipated machines
  • Represent data with discrete temperature approximate expansions?
    • New evidence that 20-term expansion may be acceptable
    • ~40 G-byte for 300 isotopes
      • Large manpower effort to preprocess data
      • Many cache misses because data is randomly accessed during simulations
  • NV-Ram Potential?
    • Data is static during all simulations
      • Size NV-RAM needed depends on data tabulation or expansion approach
      • Static data beckons for non-volatile storage to reduce power requirements
      • Access rate needs to be very high for efficient particle tracking

Co-design Opportunities for Large Tallies

  • Spatial domain decomposition?
    • Straightforward to solve tally problems with limited-memory nodes
    • Communication is 6-node nearest-neighbor coupling
      • Small zones have large neutron leakage rates –> implications for exascale
      • Using a small number of spatial domains may allow data to fit in on-node memory
      • Communications requirements may be significant
  • Tally-server approach for single-domain geometrical representation?
    • Relatively small number of nodes can be used as tally servers
    • Each tally server stores a small fraction of total tally data
    • Asynchronous writes eliminate tally storage on compute nodes
    • Compute nodes do not wait for tally communication to be completed
      • Local node buffering may be needed to reduce communication overhead
      • Communications requirements may be still be significant
      • Global communication load may become the limiting concern

Co-design opportunities for Temperature-Dependent Cross Sections

  • Direct re-computation of Doppler broadening?
    • Cullen’s method to compute cross section integral directly from 00K data, or
    • Stochastically sample thermal motion physics to compute broadened data
      • Never store temperature-dependent data, only the 00K data
      • Cache misses will be much smaller than with tabularized data
      • Flop requirement may be large, but it is easily vectorizable
  • Energy domain decomposition?
    • Split energy range into a small number (~5-20) energy “supergroups”
    • Bank group-to-group scattering sites when neutrons leave a domain
    • Exhaust particle bank for one domain before moving to next domain
    • Use server nodes to move cross section only for the active domain
      • Modest effort to restructure simulation codes
      • Cache misses will be much smaller than with full range tabularized data
      • Communication requirements can be reduced by employing large particle batches


Kernel Name

Description

Download

Download CESAR Proxy Apps