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Godzilla is helping ITER prepare for tokamak assembly
ITER employees stand by Godzilla, the most powerful commercially available industrial robot available. (Photo: ITER)
Many people are familiar with Godzilla as a giant reptilian monster that emerged from the sea off the coast of Japan, the product of radioactive contamination. These days, there is a new Godzilla, but it has a positive—and entirely fact-based—association with nuclear energy. This one has emerged inside the Tokamak Assembly Preparation Building of ITER in southern France.
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.