Fusion and ORNL’s X1E

Here’s something cool that we don’t hear about very often: atomic fusion. Aside from the occassional “fusion in my smoothie” hoax, anyway.

General Atomics scientists are using Oak Ridge’s vector-based X1E and a code called GYRO to predict what happens inside a fusion reactor, a milestone on the way to actually building one.

“GYRO performs a faithful gyrokinetic approximation of the fundamental physics that occurs when the nuclei of deuterium and tritium atoms fuse within a reactor’s magnetic containment field,” said Jeff Candy, principal scientist in the Energy Group at General Atomics. “Normally researchers do smaller electron-scale simulations of the plasma. But the Cray X1E supercomputer at ORNL has allowed us to combine electron-scale and ion-scale simulations to produce a much closer approximation of turbulence fluxes for various temperatures and densities.”

More details here.