January 2010 - Neams-pmt - mailman3.cels.anl.gov

Challenge Problem Reminder & PMT Conference Call
by Larzelere, Alex 29 Jan '10

29 Jan '10

Everyone, Just a gentle reminder -- the expecation is that each of the IPSCs will have a draft of their challenge problems by next Monday (2/2). Hopefully we will have those in hand by the time of our PMT conference call at 1pm EST (but I will not be too upset if it is COB on the 2nd). Please remember, we are not looking for a lot of text and just need a high level description of the problem. Also, we really want the problem described as a problem and not a description of the solution. That will come as part of the Implementation Plan. As for Supporting Elements -- you are off the hook -- for now. Once we have the IPSC challenge problems in place, then you will have to start thinking about how you will describe your activitites in a was that shows how the are essential for the accomplishment of the challenge problems. As for the next steps -- once we have the challenge problems in hand, we will have to start socicalizing them (if you have not done so already) with their corresponding NE R&D program elements. Finally, if you have any questions or need some clarification on the directions, please contact your Fed counterpart (you know who they are). Later this week I will send out the agenda for the PMT conference call along with the dial in information. Thanks and I look forward to seeing your inputs -- with the implementation planning process, this exercise is becoming quite important. Regards, Alex ________________________________ From: Larzelere, Alex Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 10:19 AM To: 'neams-pmt(a)lists.mcs.anl.gov'; Bradley, Keith S.; Hussein Khalil Cc: Carroll, Wade; Versluis, Rob; Funk, Dan; Peltz, James Subject: NEAMS Challenge Problem Template Everyone, Sorry for the delay - it is amazing to me how busy things have been this week. Attached, as promised, is the draft template for the NEAMS challenge problems. I have tried to provide some ideas about what we would like to see for each problem. I have also provided some ideas for the template for the supporting elements and how they are tied to the challenge problem. At the end of the day - hopefully we will see: * One challenge problem per page (and it does not have to be completely filled) * One support element description per page * ~2 to 4 challenge problems per NEAMS IPSC -- * ~2 to 3 support element description per support element Hopefully when we are finished with this process we will have a 20 or so page document that shows the "big problems" that NEAMS is focused on, the intermediate steps needed to get there and the critical role of the supporting elements. I realize that this is a tall order, but given the leadership of Keith and Hussein I am confident we can get there. Let's shoot to have a first draft of the IPSC input by the next PMT conference call (now scheduled for February 1st). At some point down the road, we will need to decide who we want to review the problems and provide the "thumbs up" that we are working on important problems. Finally - remember my ultimate criteria for a challenge problem is to have a Congressional staffer go "Wow! - that would be great if you could do that!" and then "Boy! - that is going to be really hard!" Then if we can show that we have a solid plan and a great team, we should be able to get the funding to make this happen. Please look over the attached and let me know if you have any comments, or suggestions. Regards, Alex ________________________________________________ Alex R. Larzelere Director, Advanced Modeling and Simulation Office of Nuclear Energy U.S. Department of Energy 202-586-1906 Alex.Larzelere(a)nuclear.energy.gov

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PMT Bi-Weekly Conference Call -- Monday, 2/1, 1:00pm EST
by Larzelere, Alex 29 Jan '10

29 Jan '10

Here is the call in information: * Toll Free Off-Site Participants: 866-914-3976 * Participant Security Code: 880007# Talk with everyone on Monday. Have a great weekend! Alex Everyone, The say time flies when you are having fun. I do not know about you, but these days with the way it is flying by me- I must be having a blast! Too bad I cannot remember any of it. In any case, next Monday is the time for our next PMT conference call. I do not have the call-in information right now, but will pass it along as soon as I get it. Here are the following topics for our discussion: * Review and modification of agenda (if necessary) * Discussion of challenge problems drafts (Fuels, Reactors, SafeSeps, Waste) * Update on efforts to integrate other NE M&S Activities into NEAMS * NEAMS Crosscut Implementation Plan * Spring PI Meeting agenda discussion As you can see, we will make changes to the agenda before we start the meeting, so please be ready with any suggestions. Let me know if you have any comments or questions and I look forward to talking with everyone on Monday. Regards, Alex ________________________________________________ Alex R. Larzelere Director, Advanced Modeling and Simulation Office of Nuclear Energy U.S. Department of Energy 202-586-1906 Alex.Larzelere(a)nuclear.energy.gov

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PMT Bi-Weekly Conference Call -- Monday, 2/1, 1:00pm EST
by Larzelere, Alex 29 Jan '10

29 Jan '10

Everyone, The say time flies when you are having fun. I do not know about you, but these days with the way it is flying by me- I must be having a blast! Too bad I cannot remember any of it. In any case, next Monday is the time for our next PMT conference call. I do not have the call-in information right now, but will pass it along as soon as I get it. Here are the following topics for our discussion: * Review and modification of agenda (if necessary) * Discussion of challenge problems drafts (Fuels, Reactors, SafeSeps, Waste) * Update on efforts to integrate other NE M&S Activities into NEAMS * NEAMS Crosscut Implementation Plan * Spring PI Meeting agenda discussion As you can see, we will make changes to the agenda before we start the meeting, so please be ready with any suggestions. Let me know if you have any comments or questions and I look forward to talking with everyone on Monday. Regards, Alex ________________________________________________ Alex R. Larzelere Director, Advanced Modeling and Simulation Office of Nuclear Energy U.S. Department of Energy 202-586-1906 Alex.Larzelere(a)nuclear.energy.gov

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NEAMS Spring 2010 PI Meeting -- Draft Agenda
by Larzelere, Alex 29 Jan '10

29 Jan '10

Everyone, Sorry for the delay in getting this out. Attached, and as promised at the PMT meeting, is a first shot at an agenda for the spring PI meeting. I am sure you will notice that I have plucked the dates April 13 to 15 as the dates for the meeting. Those are just my first guess at a date and I do understand that this will mean that people will have their taxes done before the meeting. You will also notice that I have laid out a two and a half day meeting, with an additional half day for a tour or something (yet to be decided). I have also not designated all of the breakout sessions to give us flexibility at how to use the time. Also, the plan is to finish reasonable early on the third day to allow folks to get out that evening. Finally, I have not designated a place. We need to do this as soon as possible so we can make the appropriate arrangements (something that is centrally located and can provide breakout rooms and a plenary room). Please look this over and be prepared to discuss these ideas at Monday's PMT conference call. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions for changes to the agenda. Also, provide any thoughts on the dates or the place. Regards, Alex ________________________________________________ Alex R. Larzelere Director, Advanced Modeling and Simulation Office of Nuclear Energy U.S. Department of Energy 202-586-1906 Alex.Larzelere(a)nuclear.energy.gov

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More "Best of" Program Plan Material and Outline Update
by Larzelere, Alex 28 Jan '10

28 Jan '10

Everyone, I found it!! - for those of you who might recall - in early 2008 GNEP advanced modeling and simulation had a milestone to deliver an implementation plan. A lot of work was put into the early drafts but in the end David Nowak and I ended up diluting the document to make the delivery date. Attached is the "close to final" draft that did not make it out the door and was almost lost to history. The reason I liked this version was the thorough job it did collecting M&S requirements from the Program Elements (aka Campaigns) the description of the structure of NEAMS. The problem with it is that fact that the document is very GNEP oriented and only focuses on the Fuel Cycle R&D. In any case, this document can provide some valuable input into our latest implementation plan. And the best part about finding it, is that I know a lot of work was put into preparing this material and perhaps now some of it will actually see the "light of day." Finally, attached is an update to the IP outline. As you will see, I added a section on the Challenge Problems and how they relate to the Imperative Implementation Plans. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments. Regards, Alex ________________________________________________ Alex R. Larzelere Director, Advanced Modeling and Simulation Office of Nuclear Energy U.S. Department of Energy 202-586-1906 Alex.Larzelere(a)nuclear.energy.gov

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NEAMS Implementation Plan -- The Next Step
by Larzelere, Alex 25 Jan '10

25 Jan '10

Everyone, If you have been following the "bouncing ball" you will have noticed that I sent you: * The Strategic Guidance Document * The NE Roadmap with the 5 Imperatives * The 5 Different Imperatives Implementation Plans * The "Best of" Previous NEAMS Program Plan Attempts In this email, I am sending out my first cut at the outline for the NEAMS Implementation Plan. There are not actions (yet) for the PMT, but those are coming soon. My next steps will be to populate the outline with as much existing material as possible. The good news is that I have now closely reviewed all of the other Implementation Plans and I found that advanced modeling and simulation is required in all of them. The treatment is somewhat uneven, but that will be fixed. It was good to see that all of the imperatives want modeling and simulation and now we need to describe how we are going to do that. Once I populate the attached outline with material we will be able to see the gaps. That will lead to sending out specific taskings to PMT members. I believe our goal should be to have a first draft of the NEAMS Implementation Plan by the time of the proposed workshop the week of February 8th. Given the amount of material that already exists, I am confident we can do that. Please look over the outline and let me know if you have any comments, questions, or suggestions. Regards, Alex ________________________________________________ Alex R. Larzelere Director, Advanced Modeling and Simulation Office of Nuclear Energy U.S. Department of Energy 202-586-1906 Alex.Larzelere(a)nuclear.energy.gov

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The "Best of" Previous Attempts at a NEAMS Implementation/Program Plan
by Larzelere, Alex 22 Jan '10

22 Jan '10

Everyone, As promised, attached is some of the material from my previous attempts at developing a NEAMS program plan. This includes an Annotated Outline and a document that combines a number of other documents into a program plan structure. I have also included an "oldie but a goodie." This was the original 1996 ASCI program plan and still stands, in my opinion, as one of the best examples of a well written and organized program plan. (No - I was not the primary author, but I think it does a great job succinctly explaining the problems to be solved and the work that will be done to do that.) So consider this more background material to be mined as part of the NEAMS Implementation Plan preparation process. I am now going to closely read the 5 existing implementation plans to see how they are organized (a quick look showed they are similar to the attached NEAMS document). After doing that I will provide a new outline and will make recommendations about writing assignments. Regards, Alex ________________________________________________ Alex R. Larzelere Director, Advanced Modeling and Simulation Office of Nuclear Energy U.S. Department of Energy 202-586-1906 Alex.Larzelere(a)nuclear.energy.gov

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NEAMS Implementation Plan -- Background Material
by Larzelere, Alex 22 Jan '10

22 Jan '10

Everyone, Stand by - we need to gear up quickly to produce a NEAMS Implementation Plan. I suspect that this will be the focus of much of next week (at least for you who are not working on your lab's Hub FOA applications). To start the process - here is some background material that you may or may not find useful. So starting from the top down - attached are: * Pete Miller's and Pete Lyon's NE Strategic Guidance that led to * The NE Roadmap which spawned the * The Extend the Life of the Current Implementation Plan * The Enable New Builds Implementation Plan * The Innovative Uses of Nuclear Implementation Plan * The Closing the Fuel Cycle Implementation Plan * The Nonproliferation Implementation Plan We will need to go through each of these plans to determine where the plans call for advanced modeling and simulation. Then we will need to prepare a crosscutting implementation plan. In my next email, I will send out my "Best of" material from my previous attempts at developing the NEAMS program plan. Finally, I will be sending out my suggestion of an outline for the NEAMS implantation plan and writing assignments. Let me know if you have any comments or questions. Regards, Alex ________________________________________________ Alex R. Larzelere Director, Advanced Modeling and Simulation Office of Nuclear Energy U.S. Department of Energy 202-586-1906 Alex.Larzelere(a)nuclear.energy.gov

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NEAMS Challenge Problem Template
by Larzelere, Alex 21 Jan '10

21 Jan '10

Everyone, Sorry for the delay - it is amazing to me how busy things have been this week. Attached, as promised, is the draft template for the NEAMS challenge problems. I have tried to provide some ideas about what we would like to see for each problem. I have also provided some ideas for the template for the supporting elements and how they are tied to the challenge problem. At the end of the day - hopefully we will see: * One challenge problem per page (and it does not have to be completely filled) * One support element description per page * ~2 to 4 challenge problems per NEAMS IPSC -- * ~2 to 3 support element description per support element Hopefully when we are finished with this process we will have a 20 or so page document that shows the "big problems" that NEAMS is focused on, the intermediate steps needed to get there and the critical role of the supporting elements. I realize that this is a tall order, but given the leadership of Keith and Hussein I am confident we can get there. Let's shoot to have a first draft of the IPSC input by the next PMT conference call (now scheduled for February 1st). At some point down the road, we will need to decide who we want to review the problems and provide the "thumbs up" that we are working on important problems. Finally - remember my ultimate criteria for a challenge problem is to have a Congressional staffer go "Wow! - that would be great if you could do that!" and then "Boy! - that is going to be really hard!" Then if we can show that we have a solid plan and a great team, we should be able to get the funding to make this happen. Please look over the attached and let me know if you have any comments, or suggestions. Regards, Alex ________________________________________________ Alex R. Larzelere Director, Advanced Modeling and Simulation Office of Nuclear Energy U.S. Department of Energy 202-586-1906 Alex.Larzelere(a)nuclear.energy.gov

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Actions from the PMT Meeting
by Larzelere, Alex 19 Jan '10

19 Jan '10

Everyone, Thanks again for a very productive PMT meeting. It was only two days, but that seemed to be about right and we accomplished quite a bit. Here are the major actions that I took away from the meeting. Several of these require some additional emails and I hope to get to them today. * Introductions: Perhaps the best part of the meeting for me was the opportunity to introduce the new NEAMS leadership council (Hussein Khalil and Keith Bradley) to the PMT. The meeting also provided the opportunity to introduce Wade Carroll, Rob Versluis, and Dan Funk from the Fed side of things (Jim Peltz will be introduced later). I do not think there are any actions as a result of the introductions, but I wanted to point out how important they were. * NEAMS Business Model: Attached are the slides I used for the introduction that capture a first look at how NEAMS is expected to operate in the future. The real test of the business model will be whether or not it allows us (NEAMS) to be successful at providing the advanced modeling and simulation capabilities needed by the NE R&D programs. It will be up to Hussein and Keith to help figure out how to operate the model and make adjustments as necessary. If people see issues, please make sure that you pass them along to them and/or me. * Challenge Problems: This will be the subject of a specific email, but I wanted to report that we made great progress on defining exactly what challenge problems are and a path forward for bringing them to a conclusion by the next PI meeting. At the highest level, we came away from the meeting with an understanding of: * The criteria for challenge problems * The fact that supporting elements will not have challenge problems, but will be part of the capability needed to address the problems * How challenge problems will be used to drive NEAMS planning * The fact that we will have some sort of outside review of the challenge problems * CT and Frameworks: On Thursday morning we had a very frank and productive discussion about CT and frameworks. I think we properly concluded that these are two separate topics and should be treated as such. David Bernholdt will continue to look at the CT issues, but with the understanding that things are confused as a result of the Hub competition. We did agree that they Hub activities have generated a lot of productive engagement between industry and the labs and that we need to make sure that is not lost once the Hub competition is over. We also agreed that the framework issue requires its own study and that David, Lori and the appropriate IPSC counterparts need to capture an understanding of what is being used in way of frameworks within NEAMS and a plan for how to unify that (if necessary). Also, to understand how the framework activities will/should interface eventually with industry and the Hub. This group is going to work with IBM to make that happen. * NEAMS "To-Do" List: We spent a very good couple of hours talking about the NEAMS 2010 "To-Do" list (also attached). I think we all came away with a good understanding of "who" needs to be worried about "what." This may be the last time that they "To-Do" is seen by everyone. I do not anticipate it being used to track the issues and we will let Hussein and Keith find their own way to make sure we continue to work on important issues. * PI Meeting: This will also be a topic for another email. We did not have much time to talk about this, but I think we came away with a good understanding of the format for the Spring PI meeting (a planning meeting vs. a technical review meeting). The thing we did decide on was that we needed to set a date and place ASAP. I will be preparing a draft agenda and that should give us an idea of what kind of meeting arrangement we will need. So - all in all, it was a great PMT meeting and I am sorry that a few of you could not make it. One of the things I came away with was the realization that expanding the group a bit (3 or 4 additional members) to capture the new Reactor Technology R&D scope is going to work. I was very impressed with the fact that we (the PMT) could have a very productive conversation, even with a large group. I attribute that to everyone's cooperation and willingness to keep the NEAMS program goals in mind. It is really nice to see how people can leave their "badges" at the door. Please look over this email and the attachments and let me know if you have any questions or comments. Also, please standby for some additional emails on topics like the Challenge Problems and the Spring PI Meeting. Regards, Alex ________________________________________________ Alex R. Larzelere Director, Advanced Modeling and Simulation Office of Nuclear Energy U.S. Department of Energy 202-586-1906 Alex.Larzelere(a)nuclear.energy.gov

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