ARRC: A random ray neutron transport code for nuclear reactor simulation

Abstract

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd A massively parallel implementation of a recently developed technique for numerically integrating the transport equation, The Random Ray Method (TRRM) (Tramm et al., 2017), is applied to several large reactor benchmark problems. The implementation, which is part of a new development called The Advanced Random Ray Code (ARRC), is one of the first parallel implementations of TRRM. Our goal is to better understand the accuracy and performance characteristics of TRRM on massive scale problems, and to provide community software that facilitates further algorithmic development and potentially its application to a broader class of problems. Key features of ARRC include extreme memory efficiency, domain decomposition, a task based parallel structure, and the ability to efficiently utilize Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) vector units. These attributes lead to efficient performance on modern high performance computer (HPC) architectures, enabling the detailed simulation of reactor cores in three dimensions.