Simulating the World’s Largest Laser with Arbitrary Lagrange Eulerian Methods and Adaptive Grids
Alice Koniges, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
The National Ignition Facility (NIF), the largest laser in the world, will access high-energy density and fusion regimes in a laboratory setting. The new regimes produced by this high-energy facility require advanced simulations to predict the effect of the laser vaporized/fragmented material on the target chamber. We show how we are using advanced Arbitrary Lagrange Eulerian (ALE) techniques for radiation hydrodynamic and material codes combined with ASCI-scale highly parallel computing facilities to enable accurate modeling of NIF experiments. The NIF, scheduled for completion in 2008, is already in operation with a subset of its 192 beams. Combining ALE with adaptive mesh refinement to create a new more powerful simulation method is discussed.
This work was performed under the auspices of the Department of Energy by the University of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under contract No. W-7405-Eng-48.
Abstract Author(s): Alice Koniges, Robert Anderson, Ping Wang, Noah Elliot, David Eder, and Brian MacGowan<br />Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory