Presentation
Extensions to Exascale Codes to Accelerate Fusion Energy Research
DescriptionFusion energy holds the promise of a sustainable carbon-free electricity source, but the scientific and technological hurdles are high. Progress is made by iterative development of experimental prototypes, where the cost of each prototype can be measured in units of $100MM. Validated multi-physics, multi-scale simulation codes are critical to reduce the number of such prototypes and mitigate design risk. We eschew low-level HPC coding and instead adopt high-level exascale-capable tools, and we expand their scope into new physics domains. In particular, the WarpX code, which won the 2022 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for first-principles simulations of laser-based electron accelerators, has been extended to implement high-fidelity reduced models of magnetically confined fusion plasmas. A zero-mass electron model has been added to shift the electromagnetic time and space scales by six orders of magnitude. A semi-implicit implementation has been added to reduce electrostatic solver time to solution by two to three orders of magnitude. Multiphysics models of plasma-material interaction are underway. We show multi-GPU performance scaling of 3D simulations of wave-particle interactions in field-reversed configuration (FRC) plasmas. We also comment on human productivity enhancements that have come with the adoption of the exascale tools and describe our IP framework for using open-source software in the commercial setting.
Presenter