The Center for Exascale Radiation Transport (CERT) was created at Texas A&M University through a research grant from the National Nuclear Security Agency (NNSA) under the Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program (PSAAP-II).
CERT is focused on the development of computational techniques for efficiently simulating thermal radiation transport (propagation) using extreme-scale or exascale computers together with the development of predictive science techniques to quantify uncertainty in simulated results. Radiation propagation plays a major role in high-energy density laboratory physics (HEDLP) experiments of the type carried out at the NNSA’s National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as well as several other NNSA facilities.
The CERT team consists of researchers from Texas A&M as well as the University of Colorado (UC) and Simon Fraser University (SFU). Texas A&M provides expertise in radiation transport theory and discretization methods, massively parallel transport solution algorithms, computer science, verification, validation, and uncertainty quantification (VVUQ), and neutron experimentation. UC provides expertise in multigrid methods for both diffusion and transport. Diffusion is important in addition to transport because diffusion equations are used to precondition the transport equation in highly diffusive problems.