The U.S. Department of Energy has chosen a major new project led by PPPL to be part of a national initiative to develop the next generation of supercomputers for the benefit of U.S. economic competitiveness, national security and scientific discovery. Known as the Exascale Computing Project, the initiative will include a focus on next-generation high-performance software and applications and workforce training.

Once developed, exascale computers will perform a billion billion operations per second, a rate 50 to 100 times faster than today’s most powerful U.S. computers. The new machines are expected to be ready in the United States in 2023 as part of the National Strategic Computing Initiative launched by former president Barack Obama.

The PPPL-led multi-institutional project, titled "High-Fidelity Whole Device Modeling of Magnetically Confined Fusion Plasmas,” will for the first time simulate a complete fusion plasma. The research will combine PPPL’s XGC computer code, which models the behavior of plasma at the boundary of doughnut-shaped tokamaks, with the GENE code at the University of California, Los Angeles, which simulates the plasma core. The modeling will demonstrate how the two different plasma regions interact, enabling physicists to understand the ultra-hot gas more fully and allowing them to predict its behavior with far greater accuracy.

“This will be a team effort involving physicists, computer scientists, and applied mathematicians,” said Amitava Bhattacharjee, head of the PPPL Theory Department and director of the four-year PPPL-led project. “Taking into account all the physics in a fusion plasma requires enormous computational resources. The exascale is very much needed in order for us to have greater realism and truly predictive capability.”

Co-principal investigators of the project are PPPL physicist C.S. Chang and Andrew Siegel, a computational scientist at the University of Chicago. Collaborating institutions include the Argonne, Lawrence Livermore, and Oak Ridge national laboratories, together with Rutgers University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Colorado, Boulder.