Particle Communication and Domain Neighbor Coupling: Scalable Domain Decomposed Algorithms for Monte Carlo Particle Transport

Conference · Tue Jan 20 04:00:00 EST 2015

OSTI ID:1179433

O'Brien, M. J.; Brantley, P. S.

In order to run Monte Carlo particle transport calculations on new supercomputers with hundreds of thousands or millions of processors, care must be taken to implement scalable algorithms. This means that the algorithms must continue to perform well as the processor count increases. In this paper, we examine the scalability of:(1) globally resolving the particle locations on the correct processor, (2) deciding that particle streaming communication has finished, and (3) efficiently coupling neighbor domains together with different replication levels. We have run domain decomposed Monte Carlo particle transport on up to 2²¹ = 2,097,152 MPI processes on the IBM BG/Q Sequoia supercomputer and observed scalable results that agree with our theoretical predictions. These calculations were carefully constructed to have the same amount of work on every processor, i.e. the calculation is already load balanced. We also examine load imbalanced calculations where each domain’s replication level is proportional to its particle workload. In this case we show how to efficiently couple together adjacent domains to maintain within workgroup load balance and minimize memory usage.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC52-07NA27344
• OSTI ID: 1179433
• Report Number(s): LLNL-CONF--666780
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS
97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING
ALGORITHMS
COMPUTER CALCULATIONS
COUPLING
MONTE CARLO METHOD
SUPERCOMPUTERS
TRANSPORT THEORY
VERIFICATION