Clustering IBM Enterprise System/3090 computers for parallel execution of FORTRAN programs
IBM Journal of Research and Development
Performance of PENTRANTM 3-D Parallel Particle Transport Code on the IBM SP2 and PCTRAN Cluster
Proceedings of the 8th European PVM/MPI Users' Group Meeting on Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface
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A coarse-grained, static-scheduling parallelization of the standard iterative scheme used for solving the discrete-ordinates approximation of the neutron transport equation is described. The parallel algorithm is based on a decomposition of the angular domain along the discrete ordinates, thus naturally producing a set of completely uncoupled systems of equations in each iteration. Implementation of the parallel code on Intel's iPSC/2 hypercube, and solutions to test problems are presented as evidence of the high speedup and efficiency of the parallel code. The performance of the parallel code on the iPSC/2 is analyzed, and a model for the CPU time as a function of the problem size (order of angular quadrature) and the number of participating processors is developed and validated against measured CPU times. The performance model is used to speculate on the potential of massively parallel computers for significantly speeding up real-life transport calculations at acceptable efficiencies. We conclude that parallel computers with a few hundred processors are capable of producing large speedups at very high efficiencies in very large three-dimensional problems.