DOE OSTI2016
The diamond difference (DD) spatial discretization has long been a work horse of the neutron transport community. For nearly as long as DD has been used in neutron transport, it has been observed that DD produces undamped, non-physical angular fluxes in spatially under resolved problems and can fail in the thick diffusion limit. A long list of alternative spatial discretizations, all with better physics properties: accuracy, robustness, and/or preservation of the thick diffusion limit, have been proposed as alternatives to DD. Unfortunately, these alternative spatial discretizations also require significantly more floating point operations (FLOPs) per unknown compared to DD. Historically, neutron transport problems of interest have been able to be resolved sufficiently that DD is accurate enough and FLOPs have been the computational performance bottleneck controlling time to solution. Thus, in practice DD has been and remains a preferred spatial discretization for neutron transport simulations. Trends in computing architecture are leading to a new paradigm where data movement, not FLOPs will control time to solution. This presents an opportunity to improve neutron transport physics by reconsidering more FLOP intensive spatial discretization than DD without incurring a time to solution penalty. In this work, we consider the improved simple corner balance (ISCB) spatial discretization, a unique alternative to DD that has the same memory footprint as DD, and detail efforts to improve its computational performance. The ISCB spatial discretization is a more FLOP intensive spatial discretization than DD with the same memory footprint as DD. Though designed to maximize FLOP intensity, third party libraries such as LAPACK are not tuned for the unique, frequent, small linear algebra needs of neutron transport problems. While hand coding a sparse Gauss elimination is likely to be faster than a dense matrix solve (CM vs. HGE), were LAPACK suitable for small linear algebra problems, we would not have seen a performance increase with decreased numbers of LAPACK calls for the Schur complement solve (SC4 vs. SC1). Significant effort has reduced the relative compute time of ISCB to DD, but on current computer architectures DD is still faster than ISCB. Future work comparing the overall efficiency of ISCB to DD may reveal that while ISCB is slower than DD on current computers, ISCB is more accurate than DD by a factor greater than the compute time slowdown. As new computer architectures become available, we will test our hypothesis that neutron transport simulations will be bandwidth limited, ideally rendering the additional FLOPs required by ISCB to be 'free' [in terms of time to solution]. (authors)
73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗