Projects Great and Small

I am delighted and excited to announce that I, and three other lucky computer science students (Sean Siders, Keifer Snedeker, and Mykola Balakin), were assigned to work on a fascinating project with Dr. Tianyi: GPU Based Modeling of Material Degradation Inside of a Nuclear Reactor.

I will be the first to admit, the title of this project isn’t exactly clear or descriptive, but I shall attempt to clarify. The goal of our project is to create a model to predict the degradation of a material as it is irradiated.

As the project’s description page explains, “such models essentially simulate the material degradation process by tracking the evolution of many many elements inside of the material over time. These elements could be atoms inside of the material, or defects created by irradiation. Traditionally, such models are challenging to run because of the large amount of elements that must be considered. However, with the amazing parallel computing capabilities of GPU, breakthroughs are expected in realizing such models in a more accurate manner by representing more physical details.”

As for the more specific details of the implementation of this type of model, I already have a few ideas on how to use CUDA to simulate this situation, but my team and I will need to gather more specifics on the exact problem to be solved. Our meeting with Dr. Tianyi will happen tomorrow, so we’ll have a better idea where to start researching this problem then.

For some more in-depth information about the scope of this problem, here is an article that Dr. Tianyi found that explains further: Stochastic Cluster Dynamics Simulations of Irradiated Materials