Diffusion2D OpenMP Parallel Computing and Intel Xeon Phi Co-Processor Support Development

摘要

The steady state neutron diffusion equation is a second order differential equation, which models a fission reactor with acceptable accuracy. Before the calculation, the reactor geometry is decomposed into a series of meshes, and each mesh is linked to its neighboring meshes through neutron currents at the boundaries. The multiplication factor and the fission densities can be obtained from the source iteration ultimately determined by the material properties and reactor core configurations. Diffusion2D is a FORTRAN90 serial program that solves the two-dimensional (2-D) neutron diffusion equation in rectangular meshes. It suffers long runtime for modelling large cores with many meshes. The objective of this research was to develop and implement a OpenMP parallel algorithm that can utilize most, if not all, CPU cores on a computer to significantly accelerate the computing speed by distributing the calculations to multiple processors. Co-processors are special hardware built for accelerating computing speed of certain programs. This research also tuned the modified program for the execution on Intel Xeon Phi co-processors to examine and compare its performance on co-processors and CPUs.