A domain-specific analysis system for examining nuclear reactor simulation data for light-water and sodium-cooled fast reactors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a domain-specific system designed to manage and analyze high-fidelity nuclear reactor simulation data, facilitating easier sharing, visualization, and interpretation of complex results for light-water and fast reactors.

Contribution

It presents a novel system tailored for domain-specific analysis of large-scale nuclear simulation data, addressing technical challenges in data reduction and visualization.

Findings

Successfully compares simulation results from different suites

Identifies key requirements for domain-specific data management

Demonstrates improved data accessibility and analysis

Abstract

Building a new generation of fission reactors in the United States presents many technical and regulatory challenges. One important challenge is the need to share and present results from new high-fidelity, high-performance simulations in an easily usable way. Since modern multiscale, multi-physics simulations can generate petabytes of data, they will require the development of new techniques and methods to reduce the data to familiar quantities of interest (e.g., pin powers, temperatures) with a more reasonable resolution and size. Furthermore, some of the results from these simulations may be new quantities for which visualization and analysis techniques are not immediately available in the community and need to be developed. This paper describes a new system for managing high-performance simulation results in a domain-specific way that naturally exposes quantities of interest for light water and sodium-cooled fast reactors. It describes requirements to build such a system and the technical challenges faced in its development at all levels (simulation, user interface, etc.). An example comparing results from two different simulation suites for a single assembly in a light-water reactor is presented, along with a detailed discussion of the system's requirements and design.