Massively Parallel Simulation of Uranium Migration at the Hanford 300 Area
Abstract
Effectively utilized, high-performance computing can have a significant impact on subsurface science by enabling researchers to employ models with ever increasing sophistication and complexity that provide a more accurate and mechanistic representation of subsurface processes. As part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s SciDAC-2 program, the petascale subsurface reactive multiphase flow and transport code PFLOTRAN has been developed and is currently being employed to simulate uranium migration at the Hanford 300 Area. PFLOTRAN has been run on subsurface problems composed of up to two billion degrees of freedom and utilizing up to 131,072 processor cores on the world’s largest open science supercomputer Jaguar. This presentation focuses on the application of PFLOTRAN to simulate geochemical transport of uranium at Hanford using the Jaguar supercomputer. The Hanford 300 Area presents many challenges with regard to simulating radionuclide transport. Aside from the many conceptual uncertainties in the problem such as the choice of initial conditions, rapid fluctuations in the Columbia River stage, which occur on an hourly basis with several meter variations, can have a dramatic impact on the size of the uranium plume, its migration direction, and the rate at which it migrates to the river. Due to the immense size of the physical domain needed to include the transient river boundary condition, the grid resolution required to preserve accuracy, and the number of chemical components simulated, 3D simulation of the Hanford 300 Area would be unsustainable on a single workstation, and thus high-performance computing is essential.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2009
- Bibcode:
- 2009AGUFM.H31B0792H
- Keywords:
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- 1009 GEOCHEMISTRY / Geochemical modeling;
- 1805 HYDROLOGY / Computational hydrology;
- 1832 HYDROLOGY / Groundwater transport;
- 1932 INFORMATICS / High-performance computing