Final Technical Report: Center for Plasma Edge Simulation (CPES) Principal Investigator: Scott Parker, University of Colorado, Boulder Description/Abstract First-principle simulations of edge pedestal micro-turbulence are performed with the global gyrokinetic turbulence code GEM for both low and high confinement tokamak plasmas. The high confinement plasmas show a larger growth rate, but nonlinearly a lower particle and heat flux. Numerical profiles are obtained from the XGC0 neoclassical code. XGC0/GEM code coupling is implemented under the EFFIS ("End-to-end Framework for Fusion Integrated Simulation") framework. Investigations are underway to clearly identify the micro-instabilities in the edge pedestal using global and flux-tube gyrokinetic simulation with realistic experimental high confinement profiles. We use both experimental profiles and those obtained using the EFFIS XGC0/GEM coupled code framework. We find there are three types of instabilities at the edge: a low-n, high frequency electron mode, a high-n, low frequency ion mode, and possibly an ion mode like kinetic ballooning mode (KBM). Investigations are under way for the effects of the radial electric field. Finally, we have been investigating how plasmas dominated by ion-temperature gradient (ITG) driven turbulence, how cold Deuterium and Tritium ions near the edge will naturally pinch radially inward towards the core. We call this mechanism "natural fueling." It is due to the quasi-neutral heat flux dominated nature of the turbulence and still applies when trapped and passing kinetic electron effects are included. To understand this mechanism, examine the situation where the electrons are adiabatic, and there is an ion heat flux. In such a case, lower energy particles move inward and higher energy particles move outward. If a trace amount of cold particles are added, they will move inward.
The Common Component Architecture (CCA) effort is the embodiment of a long-range program of research and development into the formulation, roles, and use of component technologies in high-performance scientific computing. CCA components can interoperate with other components in a variety of frameworks, including SCIRun2 from the University of Utah. The SCIRun2 framework is also developing the ability to connect components from a variety of different models through a mechanism called meta-components. The meta component model operates by providing a plugin architecture for component models. Abstract components are manipulated and managed by the SCIRun2 framework, while concrete component models perform the actual work and communicate with each other directly. We will leverage the SCIRun2 framework and the Kepler system to orchestrate components in the Fusion Simulation Project (FSP) and to provide a CCA-based interface with Kepler. The groundwork for this functionality is being performed with the Scientific Data Management center. The SDM center is developing CCA-compliant interfaces for expressing and executing workflows and create workflow components based on SCIRun and Ptolemy (Kepler) execution engines, including development of uniform interfaces for selecting, starting, and monitoring scientific workflows. Accomplishments include Introduction to CCA and Simulation Software Systems, Introduction into SCIRun2 and Bridging within SCIRun2, CCALoop: A scalable design for a distributed component framework, and Combining Workflow methodologies with Component Architectures.
This project with a total funding of $592,998 for six years has partially supported four postdoctoral researchers at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). The UCI team has formulated electrostatic and electromagnetic global gyrokinetic particle simulation models with kinetic electrons, implemented these models in the edge code XGC1, performed benchmark between GTC and XGC1, developed computational tools for gyrokinetic particle simulation in tokamak edge geometry, and initiated preparatory study of edge turbulence using GTC code. The research results has been published in 12 papers and presented at many international and national conferences.
Methods for implementing Coulomb collisions in particle codes were studied and developed. At first, a lattice-Boltzmann method seemed promising. After considering this in more detail, it was found not to be efficient enough. A method was then sought for implementing collisional effects as changes in particle weights, instead of changes in velocities. Although this may eventually be done, it was decided that a Langevin method would be more straightforward to develop, since it was possible to build on previous work. The rest of the contract period was spent developing the Langevin method, which ultimately resulted in a published paper, in April 2008 [F.L. Hinton, Phys. Plasma 15, 042501 (2008)].
The CPES research carried out by the Lehigh fusion group has sought to satisfy the evolving requirements of the CPES project. Overall, the Lehigh group has focused on verification and validation of the codes developed and/or integrated in the CPES project. Consequently, contacts and interaction with experimentalists have been maintained during the course of the project. Prof. Arnold Kritz, the leader of the Lehigh Fusion Group, has participated in the executive management of the CPES project. The code development and simulation studies carried out by the Lehigh fusion group are described in more detail in the sections below.
The complexity of modern computer networks and systems, combined with the extremely dynamic environments in which they operate, is beginning to outpace our ability to manage them. Taking yet another page from the biomimetics playbook, the autonomic computing paradigm mimics the human autonomic nervous system to free system developers and administrators from performing and overseeing low-level tasks. Surveying the current path toward this paradigm, Autonomic Computing: Concepts, Infrastructure, and Applications offers a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art research and implementations in this emerging area. This book begins by introducing the concepts and requirements of autonomic computing and exploring the architectures required to implement such a system. The focus then shifts to the approaches and infrastructures, including control-based and recipe-based concepts, followed by enabling systems, technologies, and services proposed for achieving a set of "self-*" properties, including self-configuration, self-healing, self-optimization, and self-protection. In the final section, examples of real-world implementations reflect the potential of emerging autonomic systems, such as dynamic server allocation and runtime reconfiguration and repair. Collecting cutting-edge work and perspectives from leading experts, Autonomic Computing: Concepts, Infrastructure, and Applications reveals the progress made and outlines the future challenges still facing this exciting and dynamic field.
This report summarizes the work of the National Fusion Collaboratory (NFC) Project funded by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) under the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing Program (SciDAC) to develop a persistent infrastructure to enable scientific collaboration for magnetic fusion research. A five year project that was initiated in 2001, it built on the past collaborative work performed within the U.S. fusion community and added the component of computer science research done with the USDOE Office of Science, Office of Advanced Scientific Computer Research. The project was a collaboration itself uniting fusion scientists from General Atomics, MIT, and PPPL and computer scientists from ANL, LBNL, Princeton University, and the University of Utah to form a coordinated team. The group leveraged existing computer science technology where possible and extended or created new capabilities where required. Developing a reliable energy system that is economically and environmentally sustainable is the long-term goal of Fusion Energy Science (FES) research. In the U.S., FES experimental research is centered at three large facilities with a replacement value of over $1B. As these experiments have increased in size and complexity, there has been a concurrent growth in the number and importance of collaborations among large groups at the experimental sites and smaller groups located nationwide. Teaming with the experimental community is a theoretical and simulation community whose efforts range from applied analysis of experimental data to fundamental theory (e.g., realistic nonlinear 3D plasma models) that run on massively parallel computers. Looking toward the future, the large-scale experiments needed for FES research are staffed by correspondingly large, globally dispersed teams. The fusion program will be increasingly oriented toward the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) where even now, a decade before operation begins, a large portion of national program efforts are organized around coordinated efforts to develop promising operational scenarios. Substantial efforts to develop integrated plasma modeling codes are also underway in the U.S., Europe and Japan. As a result of the highly collaborative nature of FES research, the community is facing new and unique challenges. While FES has a significant track record for developing and exploiting remote collaborations, with such large investments at stake, there is a clear need to improve the integration and reach of available tools. The NFC Project was initiated to address these challenges by creating and deploying collaborative software tools. The original objective of the NFC project was to develop and deploy a national FES 'Grid' (FusionGrid) that would be a system for secure sharing of computation, visualization, and data resources over the Internet. The goal of FusionGrid was to allow scientists at remote sites to participate as fully in experiments and computational activities as if they were working on site thereby creating a unified virtual organization of the geographically dispersed U.S. fusion community. The vision for FusionGrid was that experimental and simulation data, computer codes, analysis routines, visualization tools, and remote collaboration tools are to be thought of as network services. In this model, an application service provider (ASP) provides and maintains software resources as well as the necessary hardware resources. The project would create a robust, user-friendly collaborative software environment and make it available to the US FES community. This Grid's resources would be protected by a shared security infrastructure including strong authentication to identify users and authorization to allow stakeholders to control their own resources. In this environment, access to services is stressed rather than data or software portability.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on High-Performance Computing, HiPC 2006, held in Bangalore, India in December 2006. The 52 revised full papers presented together with the abstracts of 7 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 335 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on scheduling and load balancing, architectures, network and distributed algorithms, application software, network services, applications, ad-hoc networks, systems software, sensor networks and performance evaluation, as well as routing and data management algorithms.
This is the Final Technical Report for University of Colorado's portion of the SciDAC project 'Center for Gyrokinetic Particle Simulation of Turbulent Transport.' This is funded as a multi-institutional SciDAC Center and W.W. Lee at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory is the lead Principal Investigator. Scott Parker is the local Principal Investigator for University of Colorado and Yang Chen is a Co-Principal Investigator. This is Cooperative Agreement DE-FC02-05ER54816. Research personnel include Yang Chen (Senior Research Associate), Jianying Lang (Graduate Research Associate, Ph. D. Physics Student) and Scott Parker (Associate Professor). Research includes core microturbulence studies of NSTX, simulation of trapped electron modes, development of efficient particle-continuum hybrid methods and particle convergence studies of electron temperature gradient driven turbulence simulations. Recently, the particle-continuum method has been extended to five-dimensions in GEM. We find that actually a simple method works quite well for the Cyclone base case with either fully kinetic or adiabatic electrons. Particles are deposited on a 5D phase-space grid using nearest-grid-point interpolation. Then, the value of delta-f is reset, but not the particle's trajectory. This has the effect of occasionally averaging delta-f of nearby (in the phase space) particles. We are currently trying to estimate the dissipation (or effective collision operator). We have been using GEM to study turbulence and transport in NSTX with realistic equilibrium density and temperature profiles, including impurities, magnetic geometry and ExB shear flow. Greg Rewoldt, PPPL, has developed a TRANSP interface for GEM that specifies the equilibrium profiles and parameters needed to run realistic NSTX cases. Results were reported at the American Physical Society - Division of Plasma Physics, and we are currently running convergence studies to ensure physical results. We are also studying the effect of parallel shear flows, which can be quite strong in NSTX. Recent long-time simulations of electron temperature gradient driven turbulence, show that zonal flows slowly grow algebraically via the Rosenbluth-Hinton random walk mechanism. Eventually, the zonal flow gets to a level where it shear suppresses the turbulence. We have demonstrated this behavior with Cyclone base-case parameters, except with a 30% lower temperature gradient. We can demonstrate the same phenomena at higher gradients, but so far, have been unable to get a converged result at the higher temperature gradient. We find that electron ion collisions cause the zonal flows to grow at a slower rate and results in a higher heat flux. So, far all ETG simulations that come to a quasi-steady state show continued build up of zonal flow, see it appears to be a universal phenomena (for ETG). Linear and nonlinear simulations of Collisional and Collisionless trapped electron modes are underway. We find that zonal flow is typically important. We can, however, reproduce the Tannert and Jenko result (that zonal flow is unimportant) using their parameters with the electron temperature three times the ion temperature. For a typical weak gradient core value of density gradient and no temperature gradient, the CTEM is dominant. However, for a steeper density gradient (and still no temperature gradient), representative of the edge, higher k drift-waves are dominant. For the weaker density gradient core case, nonlinear simulations using GEM are routine. For the steeper gradient edge case, the nonlinear fluctuations are very high and a stationary state has not been obtained. This provides motivation for the particle-continuum algorithm. We also note that more physics, e.g. profile variation and equilibrium ExB shear flow should be significantly stabilizing, making such simulations feasible using standard delta-f techniques. This research is ongoing.
