Coupled Electron-Photon Monte Carlo Radiation Transport for Next-Generation Computing Systems
- Sandia National Laboratories (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
Traditional Monte Carlo particle transport codes are expected to run inefficiently on next-generation architectures as they are memory-intensive and highly divergent. Since electrons and photons also behave differently, the future for coupled electron-photon radiation transport looks even worse. This project describes preliminary efforts to improve the performance of Monte Carlo particle transport codes when using accelerators like the graphics processing unit (GPU). Two key issues are addressed: how to handle memory-intensive tallies, and how to reduce divergence. Tallying on the GPU can be done efficiently by post-processing particle data, or by using a feature called warp shuffle for summing scores in parallel during the simulation. Reducing divergence is possible by using an event-based algorithm for particle tracking instead of the traditional history-based one. Although performance tests presented in this work show that the history-based algorithm generally outperformed the event-based one for simple problems, this outcome will likely change as the complexity of the code increases.
- Research Organization:
- Sandia National Laboratories (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC04-94AL85000; NA0003525
- OSTI ID:
- 1474024
- Report Number(s):
- SAND--2018-10539; 668109
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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