ESTE4Space HPC
Project name: Supercomputer modeling of radiation consequences of events associated with space missions with a nuclear source – industrial research
Project code: 401101C513
Call - code: PSK-MSVVM-021-2024-DV-EFRR
Funding programme: 401000 - Program Slovensko - SK - EFRR/KF/FST/ESF+
The Contract for the provision of a non-refundable financial contribution is available at the following link: NFP Contract
About the project:
Nuclear power sources are a promising technology for current and future space exploration missions, as their energy replaces conventional sources, with a power density up to six orders of magnitude higher than that of chemical energy. Nuclear sources are and will be part of lunar missions (for example, ESA Argonaut with a radionuclide power source based on Am-241), as well as space missions directed to the outer planets of the Solar System (for example, the New Horizons mission). A prerequisites for the implementation of these missions are safety analyses, including the assessment of radiation risks in the event of events that could result in the release of radioactive materials, such as: explosions at the start of the mission, neutralization (deliberately caused explosion during the ascent to orbit), uncontrolled re-entry into the atmosphere or impact on Earth. The ESTE4Space software is a tool for modeling radiological impacts and radiation risks in the event of events with the release of radioactive particles into the environment for different phases of space missions.
The modeling includes the transport and dispersion of radioactive particles in the atmosphere and oceans, which subsequently allows the calculation of dosimetric parameters for the assessment of impacts on humans and the environment. The modeling is a computationally and time-consuming task, as in many scenarios it takes into account the global atmosphere (historical meteorological data up to two years and altitudes up to 100 km) and the ocean system. Dispersion and radiation impacts are modeled over a horizon of one to two years. The current implementation of ESTE4Space allows multi-threaded parallel computing within only one computing node. The goal of the project is to extend the parallelization capabilities of ESTE4Space to multiple computing nodes, and to adapt the program runtime for current “supercomputers”, i.e. high-performance computing infrastructure HPC (High-Performance Computing).
The project output will be the ESTE4Space HPC program. The proposed industrial research project aims to achieve a significant improvement of the existing ESTE4Space tool. The significant improvement consists of a fundamental improvement of the algorithms, increasing the speed and computational capacity of the modules of the existing ESTE4Space using the computing power of a supercomputer. These improvements are a necessary prerequisite for the tool to be used for operational safety analyses of space missions. Such analyses require the execution of a large number of calculations of scenario sequences in an acceptably short time interval, with subsequent comprehensive radiation risk assessment to document the acceptability of the risk for the space mission approval process.