U-M researchers to collaborate with Los Alamos National Laboratory

A $15 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory will allow a team of University of Michigan faculty and students to collaborate with the laboratory in computational science research over the next five years. The LANL is one of 17 national laboratories overseen by the Department of Energy. It focuses on national security science, technology and engineering research. 

Scientific computing is a scientific discipline which uses advanced computing capabilities to solve complex equations. In an interview with The Michigan Daily, aerospace engineering professor Karthik Duraisamy said those equations can then be applied to help model and increase understanding of real world phenomena.

“That’s what scientific computing accomplishes, trying to break down very complex physical processes and natural phenomena and solve it on a computer,” Duraisamy said. 

Reetuparna Das, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, said in an interview with The Daily she hoped the collaboration between LANL and the University will allow researchers to have access to projects they previously couldn’t work on. 

“Sitting in the university, it’s very hard to know about these problems, because we are not aware,” Das said. “These are very highly secure and sensitive simulations and algorithms which are not open source to academics.” 

As part of the Los Alamos partnership, researchers will be working to improve not only the hardware of these computers, but also their algorithm designs in an effort to speed up the computing process. 

Das said improving the computer speed will enable scientists to learn more by making the simulation process more efficient. 

“When you try to do this nuclear simulations, they take lots of memory — half to one petabyte of memory — and across very large, powerful nodes, like thousands of them, it can take many months to do this (high performance computing) simulations of real systems,” Das said. 

Rackham student Alireza Khadem said the collaboration will present an exciting opportunity for the University to make a tangible impact on computers utilized by LANL. 

“We have the opportunity to basically add our contribution to a real world chip in the near future that will be used in the Los Alamos supercomputers,” Khadem said. 

There are many potential real-world applications to the work researchers will be performing for the Los Alamos project. One of these applications is to better understand the process of nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion occurs when two light atomic nuclei combine to form one heavier nuclei, a process which releases significant amounts of energy. 

According to Duraisamy, nuclear fusion is a process scientists do not understand well yet. 

“Most of the nuclear energy we have, all the reactors that are in existence–they are based on fission, and fission is much well understood, but fusion is not,” Duraisamy said. 

Duraisamy said he and other U-M investigators are interested in nuclear fusion because it could help scientists better understand the universe through scientific computing. 

“If we succeed, then it’s not just nuclear fusion, but also astrophysical phenomena that can be understood better, the origins of the universe,” Duraisamy said. “There’s so many incredible things that we can run if we just get better at scientific computing.”

Daily Staff Reporter Amanda Venclovaite Pirani can be reached at amandavp@umich.edu

The post U-M researchers to collaborate with Los Alamos National Laboratory appeared first on The Michigan Daily.


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