Hello, A new project on the LCRC cluster has been requested. Please forward the information on to the LCRC Allocation sub-committee. Applicant's name: Dmitry Karpeyev Applicant's institution: ANL Applicant's division: MCS,MSD Project Name: OSCon Project title: Optimizing Superconductor Transport Properties Through Large-scale Simulation Associated funding: DOE ASCR/BES SciDAC-3 project OSCon Other Systems: N/A Science: Most energy applications of superconductivity, such as power transmission over superconducting cables, are based on achieving low energy dissipation in high-temperature superconductors. Dissipation is minimized by restricting the mobility of the vortices carrying magnetic field in the superconducting material by pinning them with admixed inclusions. Understanding the interaction of vortices with general configurations of inclusions is a major outstanding challenge both for fundamental science and energy applications. The task is complicated by the high density of the vortices, their mutual long-range interaction, and the dependence of their behavior on external parameters, such as temperature and the applied magnetic field. These features in general preclude analytical description of vortex dynamics and, until recently, made numerical simulation prohibitively expensive. The new capabilities of DOE's leadership-‐class computing hardware and the development of scalable algorithms and software now put detailed numerical investigation of vortex pinning within reach. Capitalizing on these developments, this project aims to advance the fundamental understanding of vortex dynamics in superconductors and to determine the optimal size, shape and concentration of the admixed particles required to achieve optimal power transmission properties. Project description: Computational modeling of superconductor properties is done via Time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau equation. This is a system of coupled nonlinear PDEs of largely parabolic character that have to be run for long times out to a stationary state where the supercurrent statistics can be collected. Resolving the inclusions as well as the evolving structure of magnetic vortices requires both unstructured and time-varying adaptive meshing. Sufficient mesh resolution pushes the mesh and convergence time requirements well past the capabilities of multicore workstations, so we plan to develop our codes in the MPI-based programming model based on PETSc. Later in the project TAO, a PETSc-based scalable optimization package will be used to optimize pinning site configurations. Scalability issues arise primarily from the need to optimize the performance of implicit time integration schemes involving coupled systems, which in turn requires fine-tuning the preconditioner. Main issues encountered here are the non-positive-definite nature of the coupled system and nonstandard nullspaces of the curl-curl operator challenging the standard multigrid techniques. In FY13 we expect to focus on our simulation, meshing, and time-stepping capabilities. We will develop our own code in C and fortran and our typical scaling runs will require up to 800 cores for 2 hours. We expect to do on the order of 100 runs in FY13 and will request additional resources as needed. We expect to have 8 users for this project: 4 in MSD (Aronson, Glatz, Koshelev, new postdoc hire) and 4 in MCS (Karpeev, Munson, Sarich, Wild). Project URL: Requested allocation: 160000 Q1: 40000 Q2: 40000 Q3: 40000 Q4: 40000 Justification: The requester has used undetermined amount hours of their initial startup project. In addition to approving an initial amount, please specify a Category and Subcategory for this project. For a list of the current selection of approved categories, please see: https://wiki.lcrc.anl.gov/wiki/Processes/Categories Once the Allocation committee has approved the project, please go to the Project Management page to create it: https://accounts.lcrc.anl.gov/projects.php Thank You, The LCRC Accounts System