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Division Spotlight
Mathematics & Computation
Division members promote the advancement of mathematical and computational methods for solving problems arising in all disciplines encompassed by the Society. They place particular emphasis on numerical techniques for efficient computer applications to aid in the dissemination, integration, and proper use of computer codes, including preparation of computational benchmark and development of standards for computing practices, and to encourage the development on new computer codes and broaden their use.
Meeting Spotlight
Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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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August 2024
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Latest News
ARPA-E announces $40 million to develop transmutation technologies for UNF
The Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) announced $40 million in funding to develop cutting-edge technologies to enable the transmutation of used nuclear fuel into less-radioactive substances. According to ARPA-E, the new initiative addresses one of the agency’s core goals as outlined by Congress: to provide transformative solutions to improve the management, cleanup, and disposal of radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel.
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.