Communications of the ACM
Stanford Engineers Receive Award to Improve Supercomputing and Solar Efficiency
Engineers in Stanford's Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program will embrace exascale computing while developing complex computer models of technologies that could increase the efficiency of solar concentrators, such as this one operated by the U.S.
Credit: SandiaLabs
A Stanford University researcher team led by Gianluca Iaccarino will receive $3.2 million a year for the next five years under the National Nuclear Security Administration's Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program II (PSAAP II) to house one of its three new Multidisciplinary Simulation Centers. PSAAP II participants will devise new computing paradigms within the context of solving a practical engineering problem, focusing on predicting the efficiency of a relatively untested and poorly understood method of harvesting solar energy.
The Stanford researchers have proposed a system in which fine particles suspended within a fluid would absorb sunlight and directly transfer the heat evenly throughout the fluid, which would allow for higher energy absorption and transfer rates, ultimately increasing the efficiency of the overall system. However, a critical aspect of assessing this technique involves predicting uncertainty within the system, and "there is currently no supercomputer in the world that can do this, and no physical model," Iaccarino notes.
To solve this problem, the researchers will have to develop programming environments and computational approaches that target an exascale computer. The researchers also will operate a physical experiment of the solar collector to test the predictions and identify other critical sensitivities.
From Stanford Report (CA)
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