HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING | COMMENTARY


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HPC finds extensive application across various domains within nuclear, including materials science, structural integrity, neutronics, and thermal hydraulics, reactor design and could play a pivotal role in enabling commercial fusion


For plant life management and for delivering operation beyond design life, HPC affords a thorough assessment and management of structures and components for ageing degradation with ‘High fidelity’ modelling, while reducing uncertainties and optimising operations. Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, USA, is using HPC across many sectors, including to test materials inside a nuclear reactor and to use simulations to develop new materials by developing them from scratch on a computer, in a bid to make better material for clean, nuclear energy production. HPC finds extensive application across various domains within nuclear, including materials science, structural integrity, neutronics, and thermal hydraulics. Likewise for reactor design with high-fidelity modelling. Furthermore, it could play a pivotal role in enabling


commercial fusion. At an ISC focus session in May 2023, AI and HPC were very much in debate. There Rob Akers, director of computing programs, U.K. Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), stated: “We simply don’t have time to deliver fusion against the timeline we’ve been given using test-based design”. He added that the answer lies in exploiting the “enormous power of data science and supercomputing at scale.”


Scalability and the future of Moore’s Law The scalability and cost-effectiveness driven by Moore’s Law has significantly influenced the development of cloud computing. The ability to pack more transistors onto a chip has led to more powerful and affordable hardware, making it feasible for cloud service providers to offer robust computing resources at a lower cost whereby cloud computing leverages the principles of virtualisation and on-demand resource allocation. The technologies and innovation sitting behind Moore’s Law have empowered cloud providers to continually enhance their infrastructure, providing nuclear companies with the ability to scale up or down as needed.


Furthermore, the rapid evolution of semiconductor


technology has spurred innovation in cloud services. Cloud providers can leverage the latest hardware advancements to offer new and improved services to their users. This continuous cycle of innovation enhances the agility of cloud platforms, allowing them to adapt to changing technological landscapes. While growth of high-performance computing and the


cloud aligns with Moore’s predictions, it faces challenges. These include factors such as physical limitations and the diminishing returns of miniaturisation. As transistors approach atomic scales, alternative technologies such as quantum computing may become necessary for sustaining the pace of progress. It appears then that we could be forgiven for thinking that we are close to reaching the limits in available computational power. But that’s not necessarily the case, indeed the cloud will continue to be the principal catalyst for realising HPC’s impact across all sectors, so long as we all work better with the tools we have to improve efficiencies and outcomes. Much of that will be down to training, and much also


down to funding, but crucially, it’s about understanding where the true power lies, where petabytes of data are processed in milliseconds. Over time needs will evolve, as indeed does the


nature of support required. What is critical, however, is that as the nuclear sector evolves with HPC, it needs support to get optimal use, and power, to realise HPC’s benefits. And, despite everything, Moore’s Law is still guiding the nuclear sector to look at new ways of enhancing computational power to increase efficiencies for operators, and likewise to give greater power at the fingertips of consumers. ■


These themes are explored further in the Red Oak Consulting report Incorporating the cloud into the HPC mix.


www.neimagazine.com | March 2024 | 39


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