Argonne Town HallEnergy

May 31, 2007

There have been two previous Town Hall meetings

• Berkeley– Nanoscience

• Oak Ridge– Nuclear Energy

• fission

Berkeley next steps

• Focused on materials– This subject is on web-site

• Carrier transport simulation for solar cell• Numerical design of catalysts• Numerical design of hydrogen storage• Biofuel• Nuclear Energy

– Fission• NIF

• Hydrocarbon fuels efficiency (combustion)– Efficiency at low emmisions

• Liquid fuels

Berkeley focused on the science

• We need to also articulate to the payoffs.– Conservation of existing technologies

• increases in efficiency - hydrocarbon fuels• Much lower emissions – hydrocarbons fuels• Solid state lighting – a factor of 2

– New systems and materials• Cheap and efficient solar cell (organic system, nano)

• hydrogen storage with the right binding energy

• Catalysis – Hydrogen, coal

Oak Ridge next steps• Focused entirely on nuclear energy

– Fuel performance– Reactor design– Separations– Integration

• Discussion centered around what challenges and issues are in the way of having exa-scale applications ready by 2015 (stretch goal)

• Not only technically complex, but complex in that new and innovative ways for engaging industry and regulatory agencies must be devised

• In some areas legacy codes simply do not exist (simulation has never been applied in these areas, e.g., waste forms) – will this make it “easier”?

• Requirements definition still evolving – Driven by two basic needs: design/analysis, safety/licensing– Depends upon user turn-around time required– The case for exascale is easy to make

• Not yet posted on web– 4 presentations yet to be translated into prose

ITER• Goal is to develop a world-leading integrated modeling capability of major

benefit to harvesting science from ITER ($10B international project to be built in France in 10-12 years)

– Key for US strategy beyond ITER to DEMO phase of fusion development• V & V a key component of this proposed “FSP” – Fusion Simulation Project

– Associated workshop report available soon (July ’07 time-frame)– Some of key codes (e.g., multi-scale kinetic transport dynamics) presently

demonstrate very good scaling on leadership class platforms (CRAY XT-3 Jaguar @ ORNL, BGL @ IBM Watson, Earth Simulator in Japan, etc.) – excellent potential for petascale & eventually exascale

– Other key codes (e.g., MHD dynamics) need to significantly improve scalability on leadership class platforms – where the “science scales with the number of processors used

– System integration will demand modern frameworks where modules with improved predictive physics capability can be readily incorporated

– Connections to international facilities over the next decade important from a validation perspective

Some additional comments

• Need exa-flop computing at all scales – 1,000’s of cpu’s to millions of cpu’s– Time to solution from minutes to weeks– Number of users is measured in multiple thousands

not 10’s or 100’s

• Theory and algorithm development will match or exceed the factor of 1,000,000 achieved by the transition from teraflops to exa-flops

• Need a systems, economic overview