Accelerating Monte Carlo Simulation of Neutron Transport on the Intel MIC Architecture

Abstract

Simulation of particle transport is critical for a great many of scientific and engineering domains. The Monte Carlo (MC) method is one of the most important numerical methods for the simulation of particle transport, and can simulate many complex types of particle transport. But the computation requirement of the MC simulation is very large. In 2010, Intel announced the Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture, which consists of many simple general-purpose cores and supports the well-known shared-memory execution model that is the base of most nodes in HPC machines. On account of the independence of simulation of each particle in the MC method, it is well-suited to accelerate the MC simulation on MIC. In this paper, an algorithm named MCNP-MIC based MIC is presented for MC simulation of neutron transport in the context of deep penetration problem, which includes the development of parallel random generator, the assignment of particle number based thread number and the design of high efficiency data structures for parallelism. Eventually, we get the results as follows: with the same problem scale and computational accuracy, the MCNPMIC algorithm has achieved roughly 5.6-fold speedup running on a 57-core MIC chip in comparison with the serial MCNP algorithm on an Intel Xeon E5-2670 CPU.