A Practical guide to Parsing MCNP Inputs: Lessons Learned from Implementing Context-Free Parsing in MontePy

Conference · Wed Apr 30 04:00:00 EDT 2025

OSTI ID:2510796

Gale, Micah D. ^[1]; Labossiere-Hickman, Travis J. ^[2]; Carbno, Brenna Anne ^[2]

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1. Idaho National Laboratory (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States). Reactor Physics Analysis and Design
2. Idaho National Laboratory (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)

Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP) is a widely used Monte Carlo transport solver that began development in the 1960’s. Due to this MCNP input files uses a custom input syntax, for which there are no off-the-shelf parsing libraries available. For MontePy to create an effective Object-Oriented interface for MCNP input files, an context-free parser was implemented to be able to fully parse the files. MontePy uses a number of shortcuts and optimizations to avoid creating a single universal input file parser. . These lessons can be applied to working with the many other custom input syntax languages persistent throughout the nuclear industry.

• Research Organization: Idaho National Laboratory (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Nuclear Energy (NE)
• DOE Contract Number: AC07-05ID14517
• OSTI ID: 2510796
• Report Number(s): INL/CON-24-81521-Rev000
• Resource Type: Conference paper
• Conference Information: International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025), Denver, CO, 04/27/2025 - 04/30/2025
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING
Context-free parser
MCNP
MontePy