NETL researchers reached a high-performance computing (HPC) milestone, running advanced energy modeling code on the world’s first exascale supercomputer — a powerful new class of computing systems capable of ushering in a new era of precision, fidelity and reliability for simulation-based engineering.

As part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP), which brought together HPC research, development and deployment activities focused on exascale computing, NETL partnered with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) to bring NETL’s renowned Multiphase Flow with Interphase eXchanges (MFiX) code to the exascale level with MFIX-Exa.

Supercomputers have revolutionized energy systems modeling through extreme processing power. Prior to exascale computing, the fastest supercomputers could perform more than one quadrillion (1 followed by 15 zeros) floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). Exascale supercomputers increase this a thousandfold — to one quintillion FLOPS (1 followed by 18 zeros). FLOPS are analogous to simple arithmetic problems, and a human being, with pen and paper, can generally solve such problems at a speed of one FLOPS.

“MFIX-Exa is an exascale-capable multiphase computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code we developed to minimize risk and accelerate the deployment of emerging energy technologies,” said NETL’s Jordan Musser, principal investigator of the project. “As part of our ECP work, we used Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Hewlett Packard Enterprise Frontier (Frontier), the world’s first exascale supercomputer, to model NETL’s 50-kW pilot-scale chemical looping reactor (CLR).”

Even though NETL’s CLR is relatively small compared to a full-scale reactor, it contains approximately 5 billion particles, which would be impossible to simulate using the discrete element method without software solutions like MFIX-Exa and access to an exascale computer like Frontier. Furthermore, these energy systems feature what are known as multiphase flows, the physical and chemical interactions of different phases of matter, making design and scale-up even more difficult.

MFIX-Exa has since been used to secure the following competitive awards:

• Several Energy Research Computing Allocations to investigate industrial-scale catalytic fast pyrolysis of biomass.
• An Advanced Scientific Computing Research Leadership Computing Challenge allocation of 100,000 compute node-hours to conduct high-fidelity simulations for scientific discovery using machine learning.
• An HPC4EnergyInnovation award to improve the efficiency of a bioreactor.

Large-scale demonstrations such as these on DOE supercomputers have established MFIX-Exa as a tool for leveraging HPC to model complex multiphase flows. As NETL remains on the cutting edge of the field, the Lab will continue to help unleash a golden era of American energy dominance.

The NETL-LBNL accomplishment was featured during the Lab’s recent 25th anniversary poster event.

NETL is a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory dedicated to advancing the nation's energy future by creating innovative solutions that strengthen the security, affordability and reliability of energy systems and natural resources. With laboratories in Albany, Oregon; Morgantown, West Virginia; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, NETL creates advanced energy technologies that support DOE’s mission while fostering collaborations that will lead to a resilient and abundant energy future for the nation.