ILLICO; A nodal neutron diffusion method for modern computer architectures

Journal Article · Fri Dec 01 00:00:00 EST 1989 · Nuclear Science and Engineering; (USA)

OSTI ID:6835999

Rajic, H L ^[1]; Ougouag, A M ^[2]

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1. Kuck and Associates, Champaign, IL (US)
2. Illinois Univ., Urbana, IL (USA). Dept. of Nuclear Engineering

A nodal multigroup neutron diffusion method for modern computer architectures has been developed and implemented in the ILLICO code. Vectorization and parallelization strategies that are successful in speeding up modern nodal computations on commercially available supercomputers have been identified and applied. Realistic three-dimensional benchmark problems can be solved in the vectorized mode in {lt}0.73 s (33.86 Mflops). Vector-concurrent implementations are shown to yield speedups as high as 9.19 on eight processors. These results demonstrate that modern nodal methods, such as ILLICO, can preserve essentially all of their speed advantages (demonstrated on scalar computers) over finite difference methods. Several ways of treating two-dimensional reactor problems with nonsquare (jagged) boundaries as rectangular domain problems are presented and their effectiveness evaluated. They result in nonnegligible performance improvements and can be devised so as to preserve the physics of the initial problem.

• OSTI ID: 6835999
• Journal Information: Nuclear Science and Engineering; (USA), Vol. 103:4; ISSN 0029-5639
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS//MATHEMATICS, COMPUTING, AND INFORMATION SCIENCE
73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS
NEUTRON TRANSPORT
I CODES
PARALLEL PROCESSING
PERFORMANCE
SUPERCOMPUTERS
COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE
BENCHMARKS
FINITE DIFFERENCE METHOD
THREE-DIMENSIONAL CALCULATIONS
COMPUTER CODES
COMPUTERS
DIGITAL COMPUTERS
ITERATIVE METHODS
NEUTRAL-PARTICLE TRANSPORT
NUMERICAL SOLUTION
PROGRAMMING
RADIATION TRANSPORT
220400* - Nuclear Reactor Technology- Control Systems
990200 - Mathematics & Computers
654003 - Radiation & Shielding Physics- Neutron Interactions with Matter