Conference looks at trends in high performance computing for advanced nuclear systems

DOE acting Undersecretary, Assistant Secretary Dennis Spurgeon to discuss Global Nuclear Energy Partnership

MONTEREY, Calif. – Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and UC Berkeley’s Nuclear Engineering Department are joining forces with the American Nuclear Society to host the Mathematics & Computations and Supercomputing in Nuclear Applications (M&C + SNA) conference, April 15-19.

The conference, held in Monterey, will showcase the role of high-performance scientific computing in all aspects of the design and development of advanced nuclear energy systems and provide an international forum to review recent research results, and the status and trends in high performance computing. With the re-vitalization of nuclear power and the launch of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) in the United States, this conference provides a forum for scientific exchange, in addition to a venue for educating and recruiting future nuclear scientists and engineers. The conference will feature plenary speakers and other experts from LLNL, other national laboratories and researchers from UC campuses.

Tomas Diaz de la Rubia, Lawrence Livermore’s associate director for Chemistry, Material and Life Sciences, is the general chair of the conference, which is being co-chaired by Toshiki Tajima from the Kansai Photon Science Institute of the Japan Atomic Energy Agency and Jean Gonnord from France’s CEA/DAM. Brian Wirth, an associate professor of nuclear engineering, and Jasmina Vujic, professor and chair of nuclear engineering at UC Berkeley, are the associate general chair and technical program chair, respectively. More than 300 scientists from 22 countries, including 13 from Livermore, five UC Berkeley faculty and six UC Berkeley graduate students will participate in the meeting.

The meeting will begin with a keynote presentation by Dennis Spurgeon, assistant secretary for Nuclear Energy at the Department of Energy, who will be speaking about GNEP. DOE has set aside $20 million to conduct detailed siting studies for public or commercial entities interested in hosting GNEP facilities. 

As part of GNEP, DOE is seeking expressions of interest from the U.S. and international nuclear industry on the feasibility of accelerating development and deployment of advanced recycling technologies by proceeding with commercial scale demonstration facilities, specifically a Consolidated Fuel Treatment Facility and an Advanced Burner Reactor.  The M&C + SNA 2007 Monterey conference is the next in a prominent series of topical meetings in the field of mathematics and computation for nuclear applications that is sponsored by the Mathematics and Computation Division of the American Nuclear Society, and will be a joint meeting with the Supercomputing in Nuclear Applications Conference series. The conference will be held at the Monterey Marriott Hotel, and will consist of nearly four full days from Monday morning through Thursday afternoon (April 16-19).

The technical program consists of 228 papers that will be presented in three plenary sessions, 30 parallel oral technical sessions and two poster sessions, by authors from more than 20 European, Asian and American countries. In addition to the technical program and tours planned for Friday (April 20), there will be three free tutorial workshops on high-performance computer codes on Sunday, April 15.

Sponsors include the American Nuclear Society, and its profession divisions of Mathematics and Computational, Radiation Protection and Shielding, Reactor Physics, Material Sciences and Technology, in addition to the Computational Medical Physics Working Group, along with LLNL, Los Alamos and Idaho National Laboratories. International co-sponsors include the Nuclear Energy Agency of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Computational Science and Engineering division of the Atomic Energy Society of Japan.

 For more information on the conference, see the Website at http://mc-sna07.nuc.berkeley.edu/

Founded in 1952, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has a mission to ensure national security and to apply science and technology to the important issues of our time.  Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.
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