High Performance Radiation Transport Simulations on TITAN

Conference · Sun Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 2012

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/SC.2012.64· OSTI ID:1156704

Baker, Christopher G ^[1]; Davidson, Gregory G ^[1]; Evans, Thomas M ^[1]; Hamilton, Steven P ^[1]; Jarrell, Joshua J ^[1]; Joubert, Wayne ^[1]

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1. ORNL

In this paper we describe the Denovo code system. Denovo solves the six-dimensional, steady-state, linear Boltzmann transport equation, of central importance to nuclear technology applications such as reactor core analysis (neutronics), radiation shielding, nuclear forensics and radiation detection. The code features multiple spatial differencing schemes, state-of-the-art linear solvers, the Koch-Baker-Alcouffe (KBA) parallel-wavefront sweep algorithm for inverting the transport operator, a new multilevel energy decomposition method scaling to hundreds of thousands of processing cores, and a modern, novel code architecture that supports straightforward integration of new features. In this paper we discuss the performance of Denovo on the 10--20 petaflop ORNL GPU-based system, Titan. We describe algorithms and techniques used to exploit the capabilities of Titan's heterogeneous compute node architecture and the challenges of obtaining good parallel performance for this sparse hyperbolic PDE solver containing inherently sequential computations. Numerical results demonstrating Denovo performance on early Titan hardware are presented.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC)
• DOE Contract Number: DE-AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 1156704
• Resource Relation: Conference: Supercomputing SC12, Salt Lake City, NV, USA, 20121112, 20121115
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English