Research on GPU Acceleration for Monte Carlo Criticality Calculation

Department of Engineering Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, 100084

^* Corresponding Author, E-mail: q-xu09@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn

Abstract

The Monte Carlo neutron transport method can be naturally parallelized by multi-core architectures due to the dependency between particles during the simulation. The GPU+CPU heterogeneous parallel mode has become an increasingly popular way of parallelism in the field of scientific supercomputing. Thus, this work focuses on the GPU acceleration method for the Monte Carlo criticality simulation, as well as the computational efficiency that GPUs can bring. The “neutron transport step” is introduced to increase the GPU thread occupancy. In order to test the sensitivity of the MC code’s complexity, a 1D one-group code and a 3D multi-group general purpose code are respectively transplanted to GPUs, and the acceleration effects are compared. The result of numerical experiments shows considerable acceleration effect of the “neutron transport step” strategy. However, the performance comparison between the 1D code and the 3D code indicates the poor scalability of MC codes on GPUs.