PARALLEL MESHLESS RADIAL BASIS FUNCTION COLLOCATION METHOD FOR NEUTRON DIFFUSION PROBLEMS

Abstract

The meshless global radial basis function (RBF) collocation method is widely used to model physical phenomena in science and engineering. The method produces highly accurate solutions with an exponential convergence rate. However, due to the global approximation structure of the method, dense node distributions lead to long computation times and hinder the applicability of the technique. In order to overcome this issue, this study proposes a parallel meshless global RBF collocation algorithm. The algorithm is applied to 2-D neutron diffusion problems. The multiquadric is used as the RBF. The algorithm is developed with Mathematica and eight virtual processors are used in calculations on a multicore computer with four physical cores. The method provides accurate numerical results in a stable manner. Parallel speedup increases with the number of processors up to five and seven processors for external and fission source problems, respectively. The speedup values are limited by the constrained resource sharing of the multicore computer’s memory. On the other hand, significant time savings are achieved with parallel computation. For the four-group fission source problem, when 4316 interpolation nodes are employed, the utilization of seven processors instead of sequential computation decreases the computation time of the meshless approach by 716 s.