About PSAAP II
Stanford’s PSAAP II Center will involve the Mechanical Engineering, Aeronautics and Astronautics, Computer Science and Math Departments on campus, and a partnership with the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Texas Austin and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The project, Predictive Simulations of Particle-‐laden Turbulence in a Radiation Environment, will investigate the effect of radiation on particle motion in an air-turbulent environment. This is a poorly understood physical process that may open new opportunities for efficiency gains in solar energy systems among other applications. Unlike conventional solar-receivers, in which a solid surface absorbs the solar radiation and transfers the heat to an operating fluid, particle-based receivers use fine grains suspended in the fluid to transfer heat throughout the fluid volume, enabling higher transfer rates and increasing efficiency.
The Center will focus on simulations at an unprecedented level of fidelity by accessing the largest supercomputers in the U.S. This will help develop and demonstrate the use of such Exascale systems (computers which can perform 1018 floating-‐point operations per second) in both science and engineering applications. Key to this effort will be use of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) such as Liszt and the ability of computer programs to identify and recover from faults. The project will also concentrate on uncertainty analysis, allowing researchers to quantify errors and uncertainties in the simulations, and therefore to determine how much confidence can be placed in the results. A dedicated experimental campaign will be undertaken alongside the computational work to help understand and identify these uncertainties. In parallel to the research effort, new graduate-level classes on computational science and engineering will be introduced at Stanford, workshops and hackathons will be organized.
The agreement continues a 15-year history of strong collaboration between NNSA laboratories and the Farm, including the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) and PSAAP programs.
