Domain Decomposition and Load Balancing in the Amtran Neutron Transport Code

Effective spatial domain decomposition for discrete ordinate (Sn) neutron transport calculations has been critical for exploiting massively parallel architectures typified by the ASCI White computer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. A combination of geometrical and computational constraints has posed a unique challenge as problems have been scaled up to several thousand processors. Carefully scripted decomposition and corresponding execution algorithms have been developed to handle a range of geometrical and hardware configurations.