Supercomputing research opportunity awarded to Chris Holland and team

May 2014

A group of researchers led by Chris Holland has received a 2014 ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) award titled "Validation Studies of Gyrokinetic Simulations to Understand the Coupling of Ion and Electron Scale Turbulence in Tokamak Plasmas".  This award provides 50,000,000 core-hours at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and 90,000,000 core-hours at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) to perform physically comprehensive massively parallel gyrokinetic simulations of coupled ion and electron-scale drift-wave turbulence in the DIII-D and Alcator C-mod tokamaks using the GYRO code. The goal of this work is to better understand when "hyperfine" electron-scale instabilities not usually considered in simulations of tokamak turbulence lead to significant increases in overall turbulence and transport levels, enabling more accurate predictions of confinement and performance in current and future fusion devices such as ITER.