Verification of MCNP5-1.60 and MCNP6.1 for Criticality Safety Applications

摘要

To verify that both MCNP5-1.60 and MCNP6.1 are performing correctly for criticality safety applications, several suites of verification/validation benchmark problems were run in early 2013. Results from these benchmark suites were compared with results from previously verified versions of MCNP5. Testing results for 354 problems on Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows systems indicate that: (1) Both MCNP5-1.60 and MCNP6.1 perform correctly for criticality safety applications. (2) Using the latest compilers, small differences were noted for a few cases compared to using older compilers, but these are strictly due to computer roundoff and are not a concern for verification. (3) MCNP5-1.60 and MCNP6.1 yield the same results on different computer platforms - Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows - for criticality safety applications. (4) MCNP5-1.60 and MCNP6.1 yield the same results using OpenMP threading and/or MPI message-passing parallelism. Criticality safety analysts should consider testing MCNP6.1 on their particular problems and validation suites, to prepare for the migration from MCNP5 to MCNP6. It is expected that this migration should be accomplished within the next 1-3 years.