Advanced simulation capability for environmental management, integrated tool-sets and simulator to enhance public communication - 15186
The U.S. Department of Energy (US DOE) Office of Environmental Management (EM), Office of Soil and Groundwater Remediation, is supporting multi-laboratory development of the Advanced Simulation Capability for Environmental Management (ASCEM). ASCEM is an open source and modular computing framework that incorporates new advances and tools for predicting contaminant fate and transport in natural and engineered systems. ASCEM facilitates transparent, efficient and integrated approaches to modeling and site characterization, and provides robust and standardized assessments of performance and risk for EM cleanup and closure activities. Site subsurface simulation modeling and performance assessments are complex and involve sensitivity evaluations and uncertainty quantification to better understand the risks at a site. The ASCEM tool-set was designed in close collaboration with the sites and other potential end-users (both the public and regulators) to allow better communication and understanding of these complex modeling efforts. ASCEM's integrated tool-sets provide a user interface and tools for managing work-flows, including conceptual model development, management of data and metadata for model input, sensitivity analysis, model calibration and uncertainty analysis, model execution on diverse computational platforms, and processing of model output, including visualization. The hierarchical and modular design of ASCEM HPC simulator Amanzi easily lends itself to translating this conceptual model of a site into a numerical model that can easily be spatially and temporally discretized to run on the HPC simulator. Together this integrated work-flow allows for a seamless and integrated analysis tracking all provenance information and modeling uncertainties. (authors)