Advances in multi-physics and high performance computing in support of nuclear reactor power systems modeling and simulation

Significant advances in computational performance have occurred over the past two decades, achieved not only by the introduction of more powerful processors but the incorporation of parallelism in computer hardware at all levels. Simultaneous with these hardware and associated system software advances have been advances in modeling physical phenomena and the numerical algorithms to allow their usage in simulation. This paper presents a review of the advances in computer performance, discusses the modeling and simulation capabilities required to address the multi-physics and multi-scale phenomena applicable to a nuclear reactor core simulator, and present examples of relevant physics simulation codes' performances on high performance computers.