Multi-core performance studies of a Monte Carlo neutron transport code

Authors:
Andrew R Siegel;Kord Smith;Paul K Romano;Benoit Forget;Kyle G Felker
Affiliations:
Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL, USA;Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA;Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA;Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA;Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL, USA
Venue:
International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications
Year:
2014

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Abstract

Performance results are presented for a multi-threaded version of the OpenMC Monte Carlo neutronics code using OpenMP in the context of nuclear reactor criticality calculations. Our main interest is production computing, and thus we limit our approach to threading strategies that both require reasonable levels of development effort and preserve the code features necessary for robust application to real-world reactor problems. Several approaches are developed and the results compared on several multi-core platforms using a popular reactor physics benchmark. A broad range of performance studies are distilled into a simple, consistent picture of the empirical performance characteristics of reactor Monte Carlo algorithms on current multi-core architectures.