VEXS, an open platform for the study of continuous-energy cross-section lookup algorithms on GPU’s

Forrest Shriver, Seyong Lee, Steven Hamilton, Justin Watson, Jeffrey Vetter

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

A significant bottleneck in continuous-energy neutron transport simulations is the cross-section lookup problem, especially in the case of those occurring in depleted fuel regions. Several algorithms have been developed over the years to solve this problem on more traditional CPU-based platforms, however new computational architectures such as GPUs may not benefit as significantly from these algorithms. As there is increasing interest in using these new computational architectures as a core part of large simulations, the relative efficacy of these algorithms compared to one another is an interesting area of research. Additionally, implementations of these algorithms are sometimes inaccessible to interested scientists outside of the nuclear engineering field given the export-controlled nature of the codes they are implemented in. In this paper, we describe our work to extend an existing open-source platform for cross-section lookup simulation, XSBench, to GPUs. We also describe our adaptation of the original codebase to handle more realistic datasets, and our efforts to accommodate different in-memory data layouts in order to more closely approximate those implementations used in production codes. Finally, we compare our results with those obtained from Shift, a GPU-enabled Monte Carlo transport solver developed for large neutron transport simulations.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationInternational Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering, M and C 2019
PublisherAmerican Nuclear Society
Pages2575-2584
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9780894487699
StatePublished - 2019
Event2019 International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering, M and C 2019 - Portland, United States
Duration: Aug 25 2019Aug 29 2019

Publication series

NameInternational Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering, M and C 2019

Conference

Conference2019 International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering, M and C 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPortland
Period08/25/1908/29/19

Funding

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. 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. This material is based upon work supported under an Integrated University Program Graduate Fellowship.

Keywords

  • GPU
  • Monte Carlo
  • Neutron transport
  • VEXS
  • XSBench

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