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Organized to promote the advancement of knowledge in the use of nuclear science and technologies in the aerospace application. Specialized nuclear-based technologies and applications are needed to advance the state-of-the-art in aerospace design, engineering and operations to explore planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond, plus enhance the safety of air travel, especially high speed air travel. Areas of interest will include but are not limited to the creation of nuclear-based power and propulsion systems, multifunctional materials to protect humans and electronic components from atmospheric, space, and nuclear power system radiation, human factor strategies for the safety and reliable operation of nuclear power and propulsion plants by non-specialized personnel and more.
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General Kenneth Nichols and the Manhattan Project
Nichols
The Oak Ridger has published the latest in a series of articles about General Kenneth D. Nichols, the Manhattan Project, and the 1954 Atomic Energy Act. The series has been produced by Nichols’ grandniece Barbara Rogers Scollin and Oak Ridge (Tenn.) city historian David Ray Smith. Gen. Nichols (1907–2000) was the district engineer for the Manhattan Engineer District during the Manhattan Project.
As Smith and Scollin explain, Nichols “had supervision of the research and development connected with, and the design, construction, and operation of, all plants required to produce plutonium-239 and uranium-235, including the construction of the towns of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Richland, Washington. The responsibility of his position was massive as he oversaw a workforce of both military and civilian personnel of approximately 125,000; his Oak Ridge office became the center of the wartime atomic energy’s activities.”
Jie Liu, Lihua Chi, Wang QingLin, Gong Chunye, Jiang Jie, Gan Xinbiao, Li Shengguo, Qingfeng Hu, Tom Masterson
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 184 | Number 4 | December 2016 | Pages 527-536
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE15-53
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Sweep scheduling methods used in particle transport problems belong to the class of precedence-constrained scheduling problems that are NP-complete. It is difficult to schedule local tasks for this type of transport problem and simultaneously optimize computational performance and parallel processor communication. In this paper, we present a parallel spatial-domain-decomposition algorithm to divide the tasks among the available processors. We also present a new algorithm for scheduling tasks within each processor. The scheduling algorithm has the required data and does not need to communicate with any other processor. This algorithm optimizes and assigns task priorities within the processor. Computational tasks whose results are required by another processor receive the highest priority. We combined these two algorithms to solve two-dimensional particle transport equations on unstructured grids. Our results show good performance and scalability up to 16 384 processors on the TianHe-2 supercomputer.