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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.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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Latest News
ARG-US Remote Monitoring Systems: Use Cases and Applications in Nuclear Facilities and During Transportation
As highlighted in the Spring 2024 issue of Radwaste Solutions, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory are developing and deploying ARG-US—meaning “Watchful Guardian”—remote monitoring systems technologies to enhance the safety, security, and safeguards (3S) of packages of nuclear and other radioactive material during storage, transportation, and disposal.
Yunlin Xu, Chen Hao
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 194 | Number 2 | February 2020 | Pages 104-119
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2019.1657322
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The solution of the large, nonsymmetric, sparse linear system resulting from the discretization of the Boltzmann transport equation can be computationally intensive, even when innovative coarse mesh finite difference (CMFD) acceleration methods are applied on a high-performance computer. The research reported here describes the development and implementation of an innovative hybrid Reduced Symmetric Successive Over-Relaxation (RSOR) and Incomplete Lower Upper (ILU) (RSILU) preconditioner for the preconditioned Generalized Minimal RESidual (GMRES) solution of the three-dimensional, whole-core, pin-resolved transport calculation of a nuclear reactor core. The preconditioner was designed specifically to improve parallel computing capability and minimize the computational burden for solution of the CMFD method on a high-end computing platform. The hybrid RSILU preconditioner is applied to the preconditioned GMRES method without multicolor reordering by utilizing the ILU preconditioner for internal elements on each processor and the RSOR preconditioner for boundary elements that would require interprocessor communication. The construction of the RSILU preconditioner requires only that the diagonal elements be modified, factorized, and stored, which is identical to serial ILU. The computational cost of RSILU is minimized since the factorized diagonal block requires minimal data preparation time for interprocessor communication and exchanges information only once in parallel computation. This paper reports first the serial performance of RSOR, and numerical results show that the new proposed RSOR is an effective preconditioner even for serial computing applications. The parallel performance of RSILU is then assessed and compared to conventional multicolor ILU preconditioners. The results show that RSILU provides comparable convergence rates to the Standard Incomplete Lower Upper (SILU) preconditioners, but it is easier to implement since it does not require multicolor ordering. Although the required iterations of RSILU preconditioned GMRES increase as the number of processors increases, only slightly more iterations are required than the SILU preconditioner for a practical nuclear reactor application. The number of iterations required by the RSILU preconditioner increases only slightly and significantly less than the increased number of iterations required when using conventional Block-Jacobi Incomplete Lower Upper or Symmetric Successive Over-Relaxation preconditioners. Overall, the RSILU is shown to be an efficient and practical preconditioner for the GMRES method for improving the parallel computing performance for large-scale applications.