Experiences with different parallel programming paradigms for Monte Carlo particle transport leads to a portable toolkit for parallel Monte Carlo

Conference · Thu Apr 01 00:00:00 EST 1993

OSTI ID:6585922

Martin, W R; Majumdar, A ^[1]; Rathkopf, J A ^[2]; Litvin, M ^[3]

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1. Michigan Univ., Ann Arbor, MI (United States). Dept. of Nuclear Engineering
2. Lawrence Livermore National Lab., CA (United States)
3. Phillips Academy, Andover, MA (United States)

Monte Carlo particle transport is easy to implement on massively parallel computers relative to other methods of transport simulation. This paper describes experiences of implementing a realistic demonstration Monte Carlo code on a variety of parallel architectures. Our pool of tasks'' technique, which allows reproducibility from run to run regardless of the number of processors, is discussed. We present detailed timing studies of simulations performed on the 128 processor BBN-ACI TC2000 and preliminary timing results for the 32 processor Kendall Square Research KSR-1. Given sufficient workload to distribute across many computational nodes, the BBN achieves nearly linear speedup for a large number of nodes. The KSR, with which we have had less experience, performs poorly with more than ten processors. A simple model incorporating known causes of overhead accurately predicts observed behavior. A general-purpose communication and control package to facilitate the implementation of existing Monte Carlo packages is described together with timings on the BBN. This package adds insignificantly to the computational costs of parallel simulations.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Lab., CA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE; National Science Foundation (NSF); USDOE, Washington, DC (United States); National Science Foundation, Washington, DC (United States)
• DOE Contract Number: W-7405-ENG-48; FG02-92ER75709
• OSTI ID: 6585922
• Report Number(s): UCRL-JC-111846; CONF-930404-12; ON: DE93009061; CNN: ECS-9107725
• Resource Relation: Conference: International topical meeting on mathematical methods and supercomputing in nuclear applications (M C+SNA '93), Karlsruhe (Germany), 19-23 Apr 1993
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS//MATHEMATICS, COMPUTING, AND INFORMATION SCIENCE
MONTE CARLO METHOD
PARALLEL PROCESSING
RADIATION TRANSPORT
ALGORITHMS
ARRAY PROCESSORS
CALCULATION METHODS
MATHEMATICAL LOGIC
PROGRAMMING
663600* - Radiation Physics- (1992-)
990200 - Mathematics & Computers