Cloud-based Scientific Workbench for Nuclear Reactor Simulation Life Cycle Management

The predictive modeling approaches and softwares being continually developed and updated by the DOE nuclear engineering scientists (under programs such as NEAMS, CASL, RISMC etc.) need to be efficiently transferred to the nuclear science and engineering community. An advanced workflow management workbench is required to allow efficient usage from small and large bossi- ness and research groups. The workbench must manage inputs decks, simulation execution (on a local machine, a High Performance Compute cluster, or a Cloud cluster), intermediate results, final results and visualizations, and provenance of the tools and settings. CloudBench is a hosted simulation environment for large scale numeric simulations. CloudBench will augment existing simulation, Integrated Development Environment, and workbench tools be- ing developed by the DOE and industry. It offers a complete set of simulation management features not available in open tools: sharing of configurations, simulation output, and provenance on a per simulation or per project basis; multi-simulation provenance history to allow simulations to be reconstructed, verified, or extended; and remote access to simulation tools installed on Cloud and HPC resources. The Phase effort demonstrated the feasibility of using existing DOE investments (i.e., the ICE workbench) to launch and manage remote jobs on cluster and commercial cloud software. In addition, an initial native web interface was demonstrated for the proposed workbench. These two pillars will support the development of the full web based large scale simulation workbench, with an initial focus on open source and government sourced Nuclear Engineering applications. The Phase II effort will develop the complete CloudBench:NE tools including a web interface for workflow management and user provenance sharing, remote job launch and management (support DOE clusters, DOE private clouds, and major public clouds), and visualization. CloudBench:NE will initially support major NEAMS and CASL simulation codes. Additional codes (within the Nuclear Engineering community and in other large scale numeric simulation verticals) will be supported with non-SBIR funds. Many engineers use vendor supported computer aided simulation tools, which include vendor sup- ported workbench and job management tools. Many open source and government sourcescodesprovide simulation features not available in these commercial codes. However, in order for en- gineers to adopt advanced simulation tools there must be an open workbench that supports easy deployment, job execution, and sharing. CloudBench will provide these features, allowing users to adopt the advanced simulation tools. CloudBench is web based advanced simulation management tool to support open- and government- sourced applications. It will enable identification of modeling codes (often developed by major government projects such as NEAMS and CASL), remote execution and cloud visualization, and workflow management/provenance. The portal enables easy adoption of government codes.