Improvements, enhancements, and optimizations of COBRA-TF

Robert K. Salko, Maria N. Avramova, Russell Hooper, Scott Palmtag, Emilian Popov, John Turner

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

The Reactor Dynamics and Fuel Management Group (RDFMG) at The Pennsylvania State University (PSU) has become active in the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL) program by delivering, supporting, and further developing CTF, the PSU version of the COolant Boiling in Rod Arrays - Two Fluids (COBRA-TF) Thermal/Hydraulic (T/H), sub-channel program. New development work on CTF was primarily geared towards decreasing the execution time of the code so that it may eventually be used for performing pin-by-pin, full-core simulations. Great gains have been made through targeting sections of source code for optimization. For example, wall clock time has been reduced for a one-assembly, three-dimensional model, containing ∼9,400 mesh cells, from 9.2min to 1 min. A further improvement has been reduction in code memory usage, which was previously prohibitive for large models. In conjunction with the run time speedups, this has enabled the simulation of a refined quarter-core model (∼460,000 mesh cells), which saw a reduction in memory usage from over 130GB to less than 3 GB. In addition to the optimization work, RDFMG has also created a preprocessor utility for the fast and less error-prone generation of CTF input decks. Furthermore, basic post-processing capabilities have been implemented by creating a CTF subroutine for producing Visualization ToolKit (VTK) files that output mesh data and associated simulation results. These VTK files can be opened with visualization software.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationInternational Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering, M and C 2013
Pages2170-2181
Number of pages12
StatePublished - 2013
EventInternational Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering, M and C 2013 - Sun Valley, ID, United States
Duration: May 5 2013May 9 2013

Publication series

NameInternational Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering, M and C 2013
Volume3

Conference

ConferenceInternational Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering, M and C 2013
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySun Valley, ID
Period05/5/1305/9/13

Keywords

  • CASL
  • COBRA-TF
  • CTF
  • Optimization

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