Parallel SPN on multi-core CPUs and many-core GPUs

Abstract

This paper presents two parallel Simplified PPN (SPN) solver implementations for both multi-core Central Processing Units (CPU) and Graphics Processing Units (GPU). For a nuclear operator such as Électricité de France (EDF), the time required to carry out nuclear reactor core simulations is rather critical when dealing with production constraints. The SPN method provides a convenient tradeoff between accuracy and numerical complexity and is used in several industrial simulations. The parallelization of the SPN algorithm reduces its computation time. To solve the problem on distributed memory machines such as PC clusters, Domain Decomposition Methods have been investigated. Complementary to this approach, this work aims to use emerging massively parallel processors such as the GPUs as well as current multi-core CPUs. Based on a fine grained parallelism, this solution achieves good performances on desktop machines. Our multi-core CPU and many-core GPU implementations allow us to solve 3D SPN problems, respectively, 10 and 36 times faster than our sequential CPU. © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.