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September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Remembering ANS member Gil Brown
Brown
The nuclear community is mourning the loss of Gilbert Brown, who passed away on July 11 at the age of 77 following a battle with cancer.
Brown, an American Nuclear Society Fellow and an ANS member for nearly 50 years, joined the faculty at Lowell Technological Institute—now the University of Massachusetts–Lowell—in 1973 and remained there for the rest of his career. He eventually became director of the UMass Lowell nuclear engineering program. After his retirement, he remained an emeritus professor at the university.
Sukesh Aghara, chair of the Nuclear Engineering Department Heads Organization, noted in an email to NEDHO members and others that “Gil was a relentless advocate for nuclear energy and a deeply respected member of our professional community. He was also a kind and generous friend—and one of the reasons I ended up at UMass Lowell. He served the university with great dedication. . . . Within NEDHO, Gil was a steady presence and served for many years as our treasurer. His contributions to nuclear engineering education and to this community will be dearly missed.”
Joshua Hanophy, Ben S. Southworth, Ruipeng Li, Tom Manteuffel, Jim Morel
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 194 | Number 11 | November 2020 | Pages 989-1008
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1747263
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The computational kernel in solving the SN transport equations is the parallel sweep, which corresponds to directly inverting a block lower triangular linear system that arises in discretizations of the linear transport equation. Existing parallel sweep algorithms are fairly efficient on structured grids, but still have polynomial scaling, P1/d + M, for d dimensions, P processors, and M angles. Moreover, an efficient scalable parallel sweep algorithm for use on general unstructured meshes remains elusive. Recently, an algebraic multigrid (AMG) method based on approximate ideal restriction (AIR) was developed for nonsymmetric matrices and shown to be an effective solver for linear transport. Motivated by the superior scalability of the AMG methods (logarithmic in P) as well as the simplicity with which the AMG methods can be used in most situations, including on arbitrary unstructured meshes, this paper investigates the use of parallel AIR (pAIR) for solving the SN transport equations with source iteration in place of parallel sweeps. The results presented in this paper show that pAIR is a robust and scalable solver. Although sweeps are still shown to be much faster than pAIR on a structured mesh of a unit cube, pAIR is shown to perform similarly on both a structured and unstructured mesh, and offers a new, simple, black-box alternative to parallel transport sweeps.
