The UQ-predictive Multidisciplinary Simulation Center for high efficiency electric power generation with carbon capture

The University of Utah Multidisciplinary Simulation Center was established in April of 2014 by the United States Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)for the purpose of developing and demonstrating the use of formal uncertainty quantification (UQ) methodologies in conjunction with scalable and portable high performance computing (HPC) strategies for solving large practical problems. Faculty, staff and students from the University of California, Berkeley, and Brigham Young University participated with those from the University of Utah in The Carbon Capture Multidisciplinary Simulation Center (CCMSC). The application selected by the Center was the demonstration of positive societal impact of HPC with UQfor the deployment oflow-cost, low-carbon energy solutions for power generation. To accomplish this mission, we developed a multiphysics, large-eddy simulation (LES) code (Arches/Uintah) to run at scale on world-class computational resources made available to us by NNSA. To guide our application we partnered with two industrial collaborators, General Electric (GE Power) and Ontario Power Generation (OPG). Seventy-eight engineers and scientist worked together in three teams to complete the Center mission: the computer science team, the computational physics team, and the UQ team.