Intel and Dell Technologies, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and the Cambridge Open Zettascale Lab plan to build a “digital twin” of the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) prototype fusion power plant.
The UKAEA will utilize the lab’s supercomputer based on Intel technologies, including 4th Gen Intel® Xeon Scalable processors, distributed asynchronous object storage (DAOS) and oneAPI tools to streamline the development and delivery of fusion energy to the grid in the 2040s.
Intel notes that engineering a new breed of power plant requires a lot of advanced tools and massive amounts of modeling and simulations. The digital twin of the STEP machine design will accelerate engineering on the project. The technical challenge involves large simulations running across thousands of graphics processing unit nodes and then transferring a huge amount of data for fast post-simulation analysis. A single plasma turbulence simulation can output hundreds of petabytes of data in a very short window. Intel DAOS is an open source, software-defined, scale-out object store that provides high bandwidth, low latency and high I/O operations per second (IOPS) storage containers for high performance computing (HPC) applications. For fusion research, it offers a fast and frictionless pathway for analysis and calculations that need to happen in an incredibly small window of time.
“Planning for the commercialization of fusion power requires organizations like UKAEA to utilize extreme amounts of computational resources and artificial intelligence for simulations. These HPC workloads may be performed using a variety of different architectures, which is why open software solutions that optimize performance needs can lend portability to code that isn’t available in closed, proprietary systems. Overall, advanced hardware and software can make the journey to commercial fusion power lower risk and accelerated – a key benefit on the path to sustainable energy," states Adam Roe, Intel EMEA HPC technical director
“I firmly believe the future of sustainable energy will rely upon supercomputing,” said Rob Akers, director of Computing Programmes, UKAEA. “The world has an urgent need to provide energy security and combat climate change. This is a journey we must embark upon together, delivering access and capability to all those who will be instrumental in delivering commercial fusion energy.”
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