The Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy is seeking to accelerate the development of advanced nuclear reactors by providing access to a new supercomputer called Bitterroot at Idaho National Laboratory.
After installing and testing the machine, Bitterroot was made available to researchers starting on June 18, INL said.
The supercomputer is envisioned to help the nuclear industry develop new reactor technologies and speed up their commercial deployment, the laboratory added.
Offered under the DOE’s Nuclear Science User Facilities program, Bitterroot and other INL supercomputers allow organizations to conduct nuclear energy modelings and simulations.
According to Matthew Anderson, manager of the High-Performance Computing group at NSUF, the INL’s supercomputing capabilities support nuclear innovation in the United States, noting that up to 90 percent of the laboratory’s compute cycles are focused on nuclear energy research.
INL built the Collaborative Computing Center that now houses Bitterroot and another NSUF supercomputer known as Sawtooth, which was installed in 2020.
The laboratory noted that C3 is home to advanced computing machines that provided users with 939 million core hours on over 3.7 million jobs in 2023.