High Performance Computing in Nuclear Engineering

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to give some key points on the use of high performance computing (HPC) in the field of nuclear engineering. This chapter is divided into two main parts.This first one is an introduction to parallel computing. In this first part, we will describe not only the main computer and processor architectures which are used today but also some which are not so usual but which will allow the readers to better understand the key point of parallelism from the hardware point of view. Still in this first part, we will continue by describing the main parallelism models, in the same point of view as the description of the parallel architecture. In > Sect. , we will give some basic ideas on how to design parallel programs. This section is the last of the first part. The second part is dedicated to the use of high performance computing in nuclear engineering. We will give first the main challenges which can be addressed using HPC. Some of them are illustrated in > Sect.  on some of the main scientific domains in nuclear engineering (reactor physics, material sciences and thermal-hydraulic). For each of them we have tried to describe the main problems which can be addressed using HPC but some of them remain as scientific and industrial challenges.