Ryan Bergmann (alumnus), Kelly Rowland, Rachel Slaybaugh, Jasmina Vujic
To improve reactor design and operation, fast and accurate neutron transport calculations are needed. Today’s supercomputers are comprised of heterogeneous architectures designed to reduce power consumption, and new algorithms are required to use these hardwares. WARP, which can stand for “Weaving All the Random Particles”, is a three-dimensional (3D), continuous energy, Monte Carlo neutron transport code developed to efficiently execute on a CPU/GPU platform. WARP is able to calculate multiplication factors, flux tallies, and fission source distributions for time-independent problems and can run in both criticality or fixed-source modes. WARP currently transports neutrons in unrestricted arrangements of spheres, cylinders, parallelpipeds, and hexagonal prisms and is able to entertain both vacuum and reflecting (specular) boundary conditions.
What sets WARP apart from previous, somewhat similar endeavors is its breadth of scope and novel adaptation of the event-based Monte Carlo algorithm. Previous codes have been limited to restricted nuclear data or simplified geometry models, where WARP instead loads standard data files and uses a flexible, scalable, optimized geometry representation. WARP uses a suite of highly-parallelized algorithms and employs a modified version of the original event-based algorithm that is better suited to GPU execution.