The Energy Department's Wind Program will be working over the next four years with its national laboratories and the Department's Office of Science to model the complex and turbulent flow of wind through large wind plants as part of the Department's Exascale Computing Project (ECP), which is gearing up U.S. computational capabilities to prepare for the next generation of supercomputers. Exascale refers to high-performance computing (HPC) systems capable of at least a billion billion calculations per second, or 50 to 100 times faster than the nation's most powerful supercomputers in use today. ECP projects target advanced modeling and simulation solutions to specific challenges supporting key Energy Department missions in science, clean energy, and national security.

The new project, led by scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the University of Texas-Austin, aims to expand three-dimensional models of wind flow to wind farm scenarios consisting of 100 or more megawatt-scale wind turbines sited within a 10 kilometer-by-10 kilometer area with complex terrain. The project will build on the Sandia-supported, open-source Nalu code for computational fluid dynamics, which is the numerical approach to modeling fluid flow. Fully implemented, the project would require simulations with approximately 100 billion grid points.