Implementation, capabilities, and benchmarking of Shift, a massively parallel Monte Carlo radiation transport code

Tara M. Pandya; Seth R. Johnson; Thomas M. Evans; Gregory G. Davidson; Steven P. Hamilton; Andrew T. Godfrey

doi:10.1016/j.jcp.2015.12.037

Implementation, capabilities, and benchmarking of Shift, a massively parallel Monte Carlo radiation transport code

Tara M. Pandya, Seth R. Johnson, Thomas M. Evans, Gregory G. Davidson, Steven P. Hamilton, Andrew T. Godfrey

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

158 Scopus citations

Abstract

This work discusses the implementation, capabilities, and validation of Shift, a massively parallel Monte Carlo radiation transport package authored at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Shift has been developed to scale well from laptops to small computing clusters to advanced supercomputers and includes features such as support for multiple geometry and physics engines, hybrid capabilities for variance reduction methods such as the Consistent Adjoint-Driven Importance Sampling methodology, advanced parallel decompositions, and tally methods optimized for scalability on supercomputing architectures. The scaling studies presented in this paper demonstrate good weak and strong scaling behavior for the implemented algorithms. Shift has also been validated and verified against various reactor physics benchmarks, including the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors' Virtual Environment for Reactor Analysis criticality test suite and several Westinghouse AP1000^® problems presented in this paper. These benchmark results compare well to those from other contemporary Monte Carlo codes such as MCNP5 and KENO.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	239-272
Number of pages	34
Journal	Journal of Computational Physics
Volume	308
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcp.2015.12.037
State	Published - Mar 1 2016

Funding

Notice: This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. Work for this paper was supported by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is managed and operated by UT-Battelle, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DEAC05-00OR22725 . This research was supported by the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors ( www.casl.gov ), an Energy Innovation Hub ( http://www.energy.gov/hubs ) for Modeling and Simulation of Nuclear Reactors under U.S. Department of Energy Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725. This research was also sponsored by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy. This research used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725.

Keywords

Monte Carlo methods
Neutron transport
Parallel computation

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10.1016/j.jcp.2015.12.037

Cite this

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title = "Implementation, capabilities, and benchmarking of Shift, a massively parallel Monte Carlo radiation transport code",

abstract = "This work discusses the implementation, capabilities, and validation of Shift, a massively parallel Monte Carlo radiation transport package authored at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Shift has been developed to scale well from laptops to small computing clusters to advanced supercomputers and includes features such as support for multiple geometry and physics engines, hybrid capabilities for variance reduction methods such as the Consistent Adjoint-Driven Importance Sampling methodology, advanced parallel decompositions, and tally methods optimized for scalability on supercomputing architectures. The scaling studies presented in this paper demonstrate good weak and strong scaling behavior for the implemented algorithms. Shift has also been validated and verified against various reactor physics benchmarks, including the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors' Virtual Environment for Reactor Analysis criticality test suite and several Westinghouse AP1000{\textregistered} problems presented in this paper. These benchmark results compare well to those from other contemporary Monte Carlo codes such as MCNP5 and KENO.",

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AU - Johnson, Seth R.

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AU - Davidson, Gregory G.

AU - Hamilton, Steven P.

AU - Godfrey, Andrew T.

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Implementation, capabilities, and benchmarking of Shift, a massively parallel Monte Carlo radiation transport code

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