Pushing Particles – The Enduring Correlation between Monte Carlo Neutron Transport and High-Performance Computing

During the Manhattan Project, physicists and mathematicians were driven to understand and predict the complex behavior of neutrons undergoing chain reactions as they built the first nuclear reactors and, subsequently, the first atomic weapons. Along the way, analog and digital computers were developed to automate many of the calculations associated with the transport and interaction of radiation with matter. Since the mid-1940s, both the fields of nuclear engineering and computer science have experienced exponential advances. Computers are ubiquitous and integrated into nearly every aspect of our daily lives, but the transcomputable nature of radiation transport still inspires the development of ever larger and more powerful computers.

This lecture will introduce the Monte Carlo method and its early applications to neutron transport. After briefly tracing the algorithmic, hardware, and software advancements that have occurred in the past 75 years, the lecture will discuss the progress being made in the Center for Exascale Monte Carlo Neutron Transport (CEMeNT) toward highly performant time-dependent neutron transport simulations on the largest supercomputers available today and in the future.  

Todd Palmer is a professor in the School of Nuclear Science and Engineering at Oregon State University. He has a BS degree from Oregon State (1987), ABD MS (Nuclear Engineering, 1988) and PhD degrees (Nuclear Engineering and Scientific Computing, 1993) from the University of Michigan. He joined Oregon State as an assistant professor in 1995, after spending four years as a physicist in A-Division at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. His research interests include computational radiation transport, reactor physics, high-performance computing, and general numerical methods development. He is a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society (2021) and has received both the Loyd Carter Teaching Award (2001) and the Alumni Professor Award (2009) from the College of Engineering at Oregon State. He is an active researcher with over $21 million in research funding while at Oregon State, and more than 150 peer-reviewed journal articles, full-papers, and short abstracts. He is currently the Director of CEMeNT, a $4.65M National Nuclear Security Administration Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program Focused Investigatory Center researching advanced techniques for dynamic Monte Carlo neutron transport simulations on exascale computing platforms.