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| News |
| Computer Science |
| Researchers Seek lingua franca |
| Physicist Don Batchelor of Oak Ridge National Laboratory is trying to solve a Babel-esque problem by creating a common language and a computational framework that will allow diverse software codes to communicate with each other in simulations of plasma--the hot, ionized gas that fuels nuclear fusion reactors. Right now only some codes can share data. Different data formats and data names confound communication between many codes. Also challenging is getting codes to couple, or provide information to other codes at specific times to solve equations about the evolving state of plasma. Coupling is a tough task because a factor described by one code depends on another factor described by some other code. "We've developed basically a lingua franca whereby different physics codes can talk to each other," Batchelor says. |
He and a team of more than two dozen researchers at 10 institutions used resources at the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) to work towards developing an integrated plasma simulator. The work was made possible with an allocation of 1.7 million processor hours on the Cray Jaguar XT4 through the INCITE program. Controlling plasma is the key to producing energy from future commercial reactors, and improved simulation capability is needed to support ITER, Batchelor says.
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