Solar tower power plants play a key role in facilitating the ongoing energy transition as they deliver dispatchable climate neutral electricity and direct heat for chemical processes. In this work we develop a heliostat-specific differentiable ray tracer capable of modeling the energy transport at the solar tower in a data-driven manner. This enables heliostat surface reconstruction and thus drastically improved the irradiance prediction. Additionally, such a ray tracer also drastically reduces the required data amount for the alignment calibration. In principle, this makes learning for a fully AI-operated solar tower feasible. The desired goal is to develop a holistic AI-enhanced digital twin of the solar power plant for design, control, prediction, and diagnosis, based on the physical differentiable ray tracer. Any operational parameter in the solar field influencing the energy transport may be, optimized with it. For the first time gradient-based, e.g., field design, aim point control, and current state diagnosis are possible. By extending it with AI-based optimization techniques and reinforcement learning algorithms, it should be possible to map real, dynamic environmental conditions with low-latency to the twin. Finally, due to the full differentiability, visual explanations for the operational action predictions are possible. The proposed AI-enhanced digital twin environment will be verified at a real power plant in Jülich. Its inception marks a significant step towards a fully automatic solar tower power plant.
“ICON-SmART” addresses the role of aerosols and atmospheric chemistry for the simulation of seasonal to decadal climate variability and change. To this end, the project will enhance the capabilities of the coupled composition, weather and climate modelling system ICON-ART (ICON, icosahedral nonhydrostatic model – developed by DWD, MPI-M and DKRZ with the atmospheric composition module ART, aerosols and reactive trace gases – developed by KIT) for seasonal to decadal predictions and climate projections in seamless global to regional model configurations with ICON-Seamless-ART (ICON-SmART). Based on previous work, chemistry is a promising candidate for speed-up by machine learning. In addition, the project will explore machine learning approaches for other processes. The ICON-SmART model system will provide scientists, forecasters and policy-makers with a novel tool to investigate atmospheric composition in a changing climate and allows us to answer questions that have been previously out of reach.
The ASSAS project aims at developing a proof-of-concept SA (severe accident) simulator based on ASTEC (Accident Source Term Evaluation Code). The prototype basic-principle simulator will model a simplified generic Western-type pressurized light water reactor (PWR). It will have a graphical user interface to control the simulation and visualize the results. It will run in real-time and even much faster for some phases of the accident. The prototype will be able to show the main phenomena occurring during a SA, including in-vessel and ex-vessel phases. It is meant to train students, nuclear energy professionals and non-specialists. In addition to its direct use, the prototype will demonstrate the feasibility of developing different types of fast-running SA simulators, while keeping the accuracy of the underlying physical models. Thus, different computational solutions will be explored in parallel. Code optimisation and parallelisation will be implemented. Beside these reliable techniques, different machine-learning methods will be tested to develop fast surrogate models. This alternate path is riskier, but it could drastically enhance the performances of the code. A comprehensive review of ASTEC's structure and available algorithms will be performed to define the most relevant modelling strategies, which may include the replacement of specific calculations steps, entire modules of ASTEC or more global surrogate models. Solutions will be explored to extend the models developed for the PWR simulator to other reactor types and SA codes. The training data-base of SA sequences used for machine-learning will be made openly available. Developing an enhanced version of ASTEC and interfacing it with a commercial simulation environment will make it possible for the industry to develop engineering and full-scale simulators in the future. These can be used to design SA management guidelines, to develop new safety systems and to train operators to use them.
The AI4EOSC (Artificial Intelligence for the European Open Science Cloud) is an EU-funded project that delivers an enhanced set of advanced services for the development of AI/ML/DL models and applications in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). These services are bundled together into a comprehensive platform providing advanced features such as distributed, federated and split learning; novel provenance metadata for AI/ML/DL models; event-driven data processing services. The project builds on top of the DEEP-Hybrid-DataCloud outcomes and the EOSC compute platform.
The Helmholtz AI COmpute REssources (HAICORE) infrastructure project was launched in early 2020 as part of the Helmholtz Incubator "Information & Data Science" to provide high-performance computing resources for artificial intelligence (AI) researchers in the Helmholtz Association. Technically, the AI hardware is operated as part of the high-performance computing systems JUWELS (Julich Supercomputing Centre) and HoreKa (KIT) at the two centers. The SCC primarily covers prototypical development operations in which new approaches, models and methods can be developed and tested. HAICORE is open to all members of the Helmholtz Association in the field of AI research.
The Helmholtz AI Platform is a research project of the Helmholtz Incubator "Information & Data Science". The overall mission of the platform is the "democratization of AI for a data-driven future" and aims at making AI algorithms and approaches available to a broad user group in an easy-to-use and resource-efficient way. (Translated with DeepL.com)
EGI-ACE empowers researchers from all disciplines to collaborate in data- and compute-intensive research across borders through free at point of use services. Building on the distributed computing integration in EOSChub, it delivers the EOSC Compute Platform and contributes to the EOSC Data Commons through a federation of Cloud compute and storage facilities, PaaS services and data spaces with analytics tools and federated access services. The Platform is built on the EGI Federation, the largest distributed computing infrastructure for research. The EGI Federation delivers over 1 Exabyte of research data and 1 Million CPU cores which supported the discovery of the Higgs Boson and the first observation of gravitational waves, while remaining open to new members. The Platform pools the capacity of some of Europe’s largest research data centres, leveraging ISO compliant federated service management. Over 30 months, it will provide more than 82 M CPU hours and 250 K GPU hours for data processing and analytics, and 45 PB/month to host and exploit research data. Its services address the needs of major research infrastructures and communities of practice engaged through the EOSC-hub project. The Platform advances beyond the state of the art through a data-centric approach, where data, tools and compute and storage facilities form a fully integrated environment accessible across borders thanks to Virtual Access. The Platform offers heterogeneous systems to meet different needs, including state of the art GPGPUs and accelerators supporting AI and ML, making the Platform an ideal innovation space for AI applications. The data spaces and analytics tools are delivered in collaboration with tens of research infrastructures and projects, to support use cases for Health, the Green Deal, and fundamental sciences. The consortium builds on the expertise and assets of the EGI federation members, key research communities and data providers, and collaborating initiatives.
Research data management forms the basis for applying, for example, modern artificial intelligence methods to research questions. Therefore, research data management is an important component of the KIT Climate and Environment Center. In the SmaRD-AI project (short for Smart Research Data Management to facilitate Artificial Intelligence in Climate and Environmental Sciences), the IWG, IMK, GIK, and SCC at KIT are working closely together not only to make the treasure trove of climate and environmental data available at KIT accessible, but also to be able to analyze it in a structured way using tools. Translated with DeepL
