LLNL Achieves Record Supercomputer Simulation
E&E’s Greenwire published an article on progress at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL), which achieved a milestone that brings the reality of “fast ignition” closer for fusion energy. Fast ignition is similar to the “central hot spot” approach of the National Ignition Facility (NIF). Whereas the NIF simultaneously compresses and ignites the target, fast ignition first compresses the target then sends a high-intensity pulse to ignite the target. From the article:
Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) pushed the boundaries of the largest and second-fastest supercomputer in the world to perform record simulations that can help model the interaction of ultra-powerful lasers with plasma to “spark” fusion energy, the lab announced yesterday.
Frederico Fiuza, a physicist and Lawrence fellow at LLNL, was able to perform record simulations using all 1,572,864 cores of Sequoia, the first machine to exceed 1 million computational cores, LLNL said. High-performance computers such as Sequoia enable special codes to follow the simultaneous evolution of tens of billions to trillions of individual particles in highly complex systems. This is an order of magnitude larger than the previous largest simulations of fast ignition, according to LLNL.
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