Modeling radiative transport in ICF plasmas on an IBM SP2 supercomputer

Abstract

Summary form only given, as follows. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison we have integrated a collisional-radiative-equilibrium model into our CONRAD radiation-hydrodynamics code. This integrated package allows us to accurately simulate the transport processes involved in ICF plasmas; including the important effects of self-aborption of line-radiation. However, as we increase the amount of atomic structure utilized in our transport models, the computational demands increase nonlinearly. In an attempt to meet this increased computational demand, we have recently embarked on a mission to parallelize the CONRAD program. The parallel CONRAD development is being performed on an IBM SP2 supercomputer. The parallelism is based on a message passing paradigm, and is being implemented using PVM. At the present time we have determined that approximately 70 percent of the sequential program can be executed in parallel. Accordingly, we expect that the parallel version will yield a speedup on the order of three times that of the sequential version. This translates into only 10 hours of execution time for the parallel version, whereas the sequential version required 30 hours.