Development Status of the PEBBLES Code for Pebble Mechanics: Improved Physical Models and Speed-up

[摘要] PEBBLES is a code for simulating the motion of all the pebbles in a pebble bed reactor. Since pebble bed reactors are packed randomly and not precisely placed, the location of the fuel elements in the reactor is not deterministically known. Instead, when determining operating parameters the motion of the pebbles can be simulated and stochastic locations can be found. The PEBBLES code can output information relevant for other simulations of the pebble bed reactors such as the positions of the pebbles in the reactor, packing fraction change in an earthquake, and velocity profiles created by recirculation. The goal for this level three milestone was to speedup the PEBBLES code through implementation on massively parallel computer. Work on this goal has resulted in speeding up both the single processor version and creation of a new parallel version of PEBBLES. Both the single processor version and the parallel running capability of the PEBBLES code have improved since the fiscal year start. The hybrid MPI/OpenMP PEBBLES version was created this year to run on the increasingly common cluster hardware profile that combines nodes with multiple processors that share memory and a cluster of nodes that are networked together. The OpenMP portions use the Open Multi-Processing shared memory parallel processing model to split the task across processors in a single node that shares memory. The Message Passing Interface (MPI) portion uses messages to communicate between different nodes over a network. The following are wall clock speed up for simulating an NGNP-600 sized reactor. The single processor version runs 1.5 times faster compared to the single processor version at the beginning of the fiscal year. This speedup is primarily due to the improved static friction model described in the report. When running on 64 processors, the new MPI/OpenMP hybrid version has a wall clock speed up of 22 times compared to the current single processor version. When using 88 processors, a speed up of 23 times is achieved. This speedup and other improvements of PEBBLES combine to make PEBBLES more capable and more useful for simulation of a pebble bed reactor. This report details the implementation and effects of the speedup work done over the course of the fiscal year.

[发布日期] 2009-12-01

[学科分类] 燃料技术

[关键词] NGNP;PEBBLES code