Development of Monte Carlo Machine for Particle Transport Problem

Abstract

Monte Carlo machine, Monte-4 has been developed to realize high performance computing of Monte Carlo codes for particle transport. The calculation for particle tracking in a complex geometry requires (1) classification of particles by the region types using multi-way conditional branches, and (2) determination whether intersections of particle paths with surfaces of the regions are on the boundaries of the regions or not. using nests of conditional branches. However, these procedures require scalar operations or unusual vector operations. Thus the speedup ratios have been low, i.e. nearly two times, in vector processing of Monte Carlo codes for particle transport on conventional vector processors. The Monte Carlo machine Monte-4 has been equipped with the special hardware called Monte Carlo pipelines to process these procedures with high performance. Additionally Monte-4 has been equipped with enhanced load/store pipelines to realize fast transfer of indirectly addressed data for the purpose of resolving imbalances between the performance of data transfers and arithmetic operations in vector processing of Monte Carlo codes on conventional vector processors. Finally, Monte-4 has a parallel processing capability with four processors to multiply the performance of vector processing. We have evaluated the effective performance of Monte-4 using production-level Monte Carlo codes such as vectorized KENO-IV and MCNP. In the performance evaluation, nearly ten times speedup ratios have been obtained, compared with scalar processing of the original codes.