Optimizing Memory Constrained Environments in Monte Carlo Nuclear Reactor Simulations

Monte Carlo neutron transport codes are a growing subject of research in nuclear reactor analysis. For robust reactor analysis, large scale neutron transport simulations require computation of reaction rates for tens of billions of particles involving several hundred isotopes. When employing physica...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The international journal of high performance computing applications 2013-05, Vol.27 (2), p.210-216
Main Authors: Felker, K.G., Siegel, A.R., Siegel, S.F.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithmics. Computability. Computer arithmetics
Algorithms
Applied sciences
Communication
Computation
Computer memory
Computer science
control theory
systems
Computer simulation
Computer systems and distributed systems. User interface
Exact sciences and technology
Memory and file management (including protection and security)
Memory organisation. Data processing
Monte Carlo methods
Monte Carlo simulation
Nuclear physics
Nuclear reactor components
Nuclear reactors
Software
Source code
Studies
Theoretical computing
Transport
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Summary:Monte Carlo neutron transport codes are a growing subject of research in nuclear reactor analysis. For robust reactor analysis, large scale neutron transport simulations require computation of reaction rates for tens of billions of particles involving several hundred isotopes. When employing physical-space domain decomposition, minimizing memory consumption while safely and efficiently exchanging massive amounts of data is a significant challenge. To address this problem, we implement and test several “memory-aware”, in-place, sparse, all-to-all MPI communication implementations. The algorithms are developed and tested within the open source MADRE (Memory-Aware Data Redistribution) project, which gives application programmers a simple API and set of tools and algorithms for carrying out memory-transparent in-place communication. We explore memory and communication efficiency tradeoffs for a range of in-place algorithms using a simple Monte Carlo communication kernel intended to mimic the behavior of our full Monte Carlo neutronics code.
ISSN:1094-3420
1741-2846
DOI:10.1177/1094342012445627