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Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Winter Conference and Expo
November 17–21, 2024
Orlando, FL|Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Latest News
New laws offer nuclear industry incentives for existing power plant uprates
This year, the U.S. nuclear industry received a much-needed economic boost that could help preserve operating nuclear power plants and incentivize upgrades that extend their lifespan and power output.
Signed into law in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act offers production tax credits (PTCs) for existing nuclear power plants and either PTCs or investment tax credits (ITCs) for new carbon-free generation. These credits could make power uprates—increasing the maximum power level at which a commercial plant may operate—a much more appealing option for utilities.
Kenji Higuchi, Kiyoshi Asai, Yukihiro Hasegawa
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 127 | Number 1 | September 1997 | Pages 78-88
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE97-A1922
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Experiences with vectorization of production-level Monte Carlo codes such as KENO-IV, MCNP, VIM, and MORSE have shown that it is difficult to attain high speedup ratios on vector processors because of indirect addressing, nests of conditional branches, short vector length, cache misses, and operations for realization of robustness and generality. A previous work has already shown that the first, second, and third difficulties can be resolved by using special computer hardware for vector processing of Monte Carlo codes. Here, the fourth and fifth difficulties are discussed in detail using the results for a vectorized version of the MORSE code. As for the fourth difficulty, it is shown that the cache miss-hit ratio affects execution times of the vectorized Monte Carlo codes and the ratio strongly depends on the number of the particles simultaneously tracked. As for the fifth difficulty, it is shown that remarkable speedup ratios are obtained by removing operations that are not essential to the specific problem being solved. These experiences have shown that if a production-level Monte Carlo code system had a capability to selectively construct source coding that complements the input data, then the resulting code could achieve much higher performance.