Evaluation of vectorized Monte Carlo algorithms on GPUs for a neutron Eigenvalue problem
- Nuclear Engineering Program, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180 (United States)
- Monte Carlo Codes Group, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545 (United States)
Conventional Monte Carlo (MC) methods for radiation transport computations are 'history-based', which means that one particle history at a time is tracked. Simulations based on such methods suffer from thread divergence on the graphics processing unit (GPU), which severely affects the performance of GPUs. To circumvent this limitation, event-based vectorized MC algorithms can be utilized. A versatile software test-bed, called ARCHER - Accelerated Radiation-transport Computations in Heterogeneous Environments - was used for this study. ARCHER facilitates the development and testing of a MC code based on the vectorized MC algorithm implemented on GPUs by using NVIDIA's Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). The ARCHER{sub GPU} code was designed to solve a neutron eigenvalue problem and was tested on a NVIDIA Tesla M2090 Fermi card. We found that although the vectorized MC method significantly reduces the occurrence of divergent branching and enhances the warp execution efficiency, the overall simulation speed is ten times slower than the conventional history-based MC method on GPUs. By analyzing detailed GPU profiling information from ARCHER, we discovered that the main reason was the large amount of global memory transactions, causing severe memory access latency. Several possible solutions to alleviate the memory latency issue are discussed. (authors)
- Research Organization:
- American Nuclear Society, 555 North Kensington Avenue, La Grange Park, IL 60526 (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 22212894
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: M and C 2013: 2013 International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering, Sun Valley, ID (United States), 5-9 May 2013; Other Information: Country of input: France; 14 refs.; Related Information: In: Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering - M and C 2013| 3016 p.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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