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Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
Timothy J. Tautges, Gregory A. Moses, Michael L. Corradini
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 114 | Number 1 | May 1993 | Pages 36-41
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE93-A24012
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Severe accident codes, i.e., codes that model core meltdown and accident progression in light water reactors, do not currently make use of parallel processing technology. Previous efforts to parallelize severe accident codes using DO-loop or data partitioning have resulted in speedup factors of <2.0 because of large serial code sections. Severe accident codes are more amenable to the functional partitioning approach, which splits a code into parallel tasks each representing a separate physical model. When combined, the two methods are able to partition 95% of the HECTR containment analysis code. Overall speedups of 2.6 and 3.2 on four and eight processors are obtained with the parallel HECTR code on an Alliant FX/80 parallel computer when modeling a moderately sized accident scenario. Speedups are expected to increase for larger severe accident codes, such as MELCOR, which contain more functional parallelism than the HECTR code.