A domain-specific analysis system for examining nuclear reactor simulation data for light-water and sodium-cooled fast reactors

Abstract

Building new fission reactors in the United States presents many tech- nical and regulatory challenges. Chief among the technical challenges is the need to share and present results from new high-fidelity, high- performance simulations in an easily consumable way. Since modern multi-scale, multi-physics simulations can generate petabytes of data, this will require the development of new techniques and methods to reduce the data to familiar quantities of interest with a more reasonable resolution and size. Furthermore, some of the results from these simulations may be new quantities for which visualization and analysis techniques are not immediately available in the community and need to be developed. This paper describes a new system for managing high-performance simulation results in a domain-specific way that naturally exposes quanti- ties of interest for light water and sodium-cooled fast reactors. It enables easy qualitative and quantitative comparisons between simulation results with a graphical user interface and cross-platform, multi-language input- output libraries for use by developers to work with the data. An example comparing results from two different simulation suites for a single assem- bly in a light-water reactor is presented along with a detailed discussion of the system’s requirements and design.