Large scale simulation of the irradiation effects in reactor materials. The REVE project

REVE is an American and European project to build tools to simulate neutron irradiation effects in structural materials. The first phase of the project is a demonstration phase. Its objective is to show the feasibility of quantitative simulation of irradiation effects. The demonstration with be performed on reactor pressure vessel steels. The second phase will detal with other materials: stainless steels, zirconium alloys, ... This paper presents the architecture of the simulation tools which will be developed in Europe. It emphasises the links and communications between the codes and the computers. The atomic simulation part in that project is very important and really the most time consuming one, it takes advantage of state of the art supercomputers. Large molecular dynamics simulations with more than one million atoms are performed to simulate energetic 'displacement cascades' and interactions between dislocations and hardening defects. The formation of the latter is computed by combining kinetic Monte Carlo simulations and chemical rate equations. Furthermore ab initio (density functional theory based) calculations which need large computer resources are needed to evaluate some input parameters of the models or to modelize the 'chemical' aspects of more complicated phenomena. The parallelized codes run on clusters based on PCs or workstations and large parallel machines, taking advantage of their portability. (author)