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On moving fast and breaking things
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
So much of what is happening in federal nuclear policy these days seems driven by a common approach popularized in the technology sector. Silicon Valley calls it “move fast and break things,” a phrase originally associated with Facebook’s early culture under Mark Zuckerberg. The idea emerged in the early 2000s as software companies discovered that rapid iteration, frequent experimentation, and a willingness to tolerate failure could dramatically accelerate innovation. This philosophy helped drive the growth of the social media, smartphones, cloud computing, and digital platforms that now underpin modern economic and social life.
Today, that mindset is also influencing federal nuclear policy. The Trump administration views accelerated nuclear deployment as part of a broader competition with China for technological and AI leadership. In that context, it seems willing to accept greater operational risk in pursuit of strategic advantage and long-term economic and security objectives.
Milan Hanus, Jean C. Ragusa
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 194 | Number 10 | October 2020 | Pages 873-893
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1767436
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work is motivated by the need to solve realistic problems with complex energy, space, and angle dependence, which requires parallel multigroup transport sweeps combined with efficient acceleration of the thermal upscattering. We present various iterative schemes based on the two-grid (TG) diffusion synthetic acceleration (DSA) method. In its original form, the TG method is used with the Gauss-Seidel iterative scheme over energy groups, which makes it impractical for parallel computation. We therefore formulate a Jacobi-style version. Furthermore, we propose a new scheme that reduces the overall number of transport sweeps by removing the need to fully converge the within-group iterations before the TG step. This becomes possible by adding an additional within-group DSA solve after each transport sweep. Fourier analyses are carried out to ascertain the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, with further corroboration from massively parallel numerical results from practical problem calculations. We discuss several implementation strategies of the new scheme, paying particular attention to the consequences on the overall efficiency of adding additional diffusion solves with a relatively low number of degrees of freedom per process.