Exascale Computation, And Their Potential Role In Addressing Nuclear Weapons Mission Challenges

• Director’s classified colloquium
• Presented by: John Sarrao, Robert Webster
• January 19, 2011

The presentation discussed the computational challenges and opportunities expected in the emerging Exascale class computational environment, and how the capabilities envisioned for MaRIE can provide the complementary scientific insight to address the weapons program's material challenges.

Over the next decade, computing will evolve to support Exascale class computation. Through the application of Exascale computing, we will turn the understanding developed with MaRIE into computational models with broad predictive applicability. By building scale-independent (e.g. microstructure aware) material models into our weapons simulations, the simulation results can be expected to capture reliably the impacts of changes of scale that will occur when models that can only be tested on small physical-scale experiments are applied in a weapon simulation.

The possibility of including such models is enabled by the nearly thousand-fold increase in computational cycles expected to be available around the end of the next decade.